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“A watched backup never ends.”

I’ve been watching the MB fall for the past ten minutes, and it seems as if time is slowing down. Perhaps I need a proper hobby.

I’ve just had a very tense and stressful week, which was due to a combination of having a bad cough and cold and feeling rotten, and yet still having to prepare to give a research seminar at another University, which–for one reason or another–turned into a much more significant event than it would normally be.

I did the seminar yesterday. Things went fine, people seemed to enjoy my talk and my voice didn’t pack up, and now I feel exhausted but exhilarated. Finally, the weight that has been pressing down on me so insistently for a week has been lifted off, and I feel very light and free. Sometimes it’s worthwhile enduring stress–if only for the fact that it’s nice when you stop (like hitting your head against a wall). In fact life would be pretty dull (comfortable, but dull) if we didn’t stress ourselves at all. The challenge can be wonderful, and you get a great feeling from overcoming (or at least enduring) obstacles. The real problem comes–I suppose–when stress becomes chronic and inescapable.

I had a dream about the talk a few days before I was due to give it. I don’t normally talk about my dreams¹, but I’ll describe this one because I think it shows just how much pressure I felt myself to be under.

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For four days, I’ve had a wracking cough. This has meant that I haven’t got much sleep, and I’m constantly irritated by a dreadful, incessant tickling in my bronchi. I feel like my lungs are trying to escape. In an attempt to distract myself from these annoyances, I was trying to think about the kind of simple, pleasurable things I enjoy.

I remembered a cold winter walk I went on a little while ago. As I walked by the river, I found a big, white swan’s feather. It was a body feather, and had the contradictory properties of strength, suppleness and softness. As I walked along, I slowly drew the feather between my closed index and middle fingers, pulling it gently against the direction of its natural curve and enjoying the soft snick sound it made as it slipped free of my fingers. I repeated the action over and over again, until it became like a sensual mantra, and was very soothing. I wish I had a swan’s feather now.

Like many people, I’ve been deluged by virus-laden and bounced emails (with my address spoofed as the sender) as a result of the MyDoom virus. I’ve also had the usual quantity of spam, through which I have to dredge to find my genuine email. But among the usual crop of ‘hot chicks/viagra/Atkins diet’ tempting offers, one spam stood out—metallic yarn on special offer.

And my metallic yarn needs have gone unfulfilled for so long.

If anyone else has received an email with the subject line “The Garden of Eden” which appears to originate from my rousette.org.uk email address, I hope that I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t send it. I’ve received one email from a perplexed recipient already, but I’m reluctant to reply directly to the sender in case it’s an even more byzantine spamming attempt.

The email is most likely from a sender who is unknowingly infected with the Klez virus. This virus can spoof the “From:” address using an entry in the address book of an infected user. So if any of you have my email address in your address book (and you are devil-may-care enough to use MS LookOut Outlook), perhaps you might think about giving your hard drive a quick once-over with an anti-virus application.

This has been a Bsag Computer Safety Announcement. “Charlie says ‘Don’t play with viruses’.”¹

¹ Google has failed me. I made a valiant attempt to provide an explanatory link for those who weren’t watching UK television in the 1970s, and were therefore not exposed to Charlie the Cat’s unintelligible pronouncements about the utter foolishness of playing on railway lines. A Bsag Brownie Point goes to the first person providing a link…

We were watching a documentary we had recorded about religion and celibacy. Well, when I say ‘we were watching’, what I actually mean is that Mr. Bsag was watching while I surfed blogs and half listened but mostly didn’t watch.

Suddenly Mr. Bsag says, “Look at those big knobs”. Since the last image I glimpsed was of Hindu Sadhus doing very painful-looking things to their penises with long sticks, this immediately got my full attention. “Oh, you mean those kinds of knobs”. It was footage of a lab in the 1960s with some heavy duty recording equipment with—yes—big knobs. That’ll teach me not to try to parallel process.

I was reading the latest MacUser magazine over breakfast this morning, and my attention was caught by a review for a new Pentax digital SLR. It’s a lovely looking camera, and was given a rave review in Digital Camera Magazine, but the thing that struck me first was the name. It’s called the *ist D. Yes, that is an asterisk.

I was so convinced that ‘*ist D’ was the catastrophic outcome of some freak spell checker accident that I checked Pentax’s own site, but it turned out to be the real name. What marketing department was responsible for that one, I wonder? I have this idea that they put the asterisk in as some kind of glob place holder for the first part of the name: “photoist, pictureist, digist, camist? Oh, forget it, let’s go to the pub. Leave it as *ist, no-one will care. *ist D. For digital. Sorted.”

What I’d like to know (and what isn’t even discussed in any of the reviews I’ve seen) is how the blithering heck you’re supposed to pronounce it.

I caught a classic bit of the Today programme this morning. They had Falim Khoury (the head barman at the Savoy Hotel) shaking cocktails for everyone, and it was fairly evident from the general level of merriment that a certain amount of actual drinking was going on. Poor Charlotte Green had to try to read the news with sounds of shaking cocktails in the background, and she got a serious case of the giggles. The cocktail in question was a ‘Corpse Reviver’—she evidently needed an anti-corpse reviver to stop her corpsing. In the end, she had to wheeze, “Stop it, Jim!”. I assume that he was making faces at her and making it even worse.

Even if you didn’t start your celebrations quite that early, have a good time tonight, and I hope that you do a lot of giggling.

I’m going to take a short break from blogging over the holiday, so I hope you all have a relaxing break from work—however you choose to celebrate (or not celebrate) the season.

In the interests of counting my blessings…

1. I’ve just finished two days of interviewing prospective undergraduates. This is surprisingly hard work. If you’re at all empathic, the fog of nervousness exuded by the students starts to seep into your pores. It took a session with my iPod playing Magnetic Fields at an unwisely high volume on the way home to expunge the feeling.
2. Our beloved iMac is back home with a shiny new keyboard¹, and a shiny new video card. I can’t believe how much we missed it, particularly for recording programmes off Radio 4 to listen to later.

Reasons to be slightly worried, 1…

1. I’ve got to get two grant applications submitted before Christmas.

¹ Mr. Bsag is under orders to not allow tea to come within 5m of the iMac, or there’ll be trouble…

p. I’m sorry about all the messing about, but I’ve finally managed to improve the switcher without breaking anything[1]. I’ve also rolled it out to all of the main pages, so nice titles should work everywhere (or not work everywhere if you’ve got it switched off). I’ll stop messing about now…

fn1. Yesterday I left out a set of parentheses in the JavaScript, which was what caused all the problems. D’oh!

p. Sorry about the disappearance of the ‘Nice titles’ switcher in the sidebar on the right. I was trying to improve it by changing it into a radio button, which would also show the current state, and—well, I broke it. And I didn’t make a backup of the file before I started.

p. This is what happens when you try writing JavaScript when you’ve got a heavy cold. I’ll endeavour to get something working when I’m feeling a bit better. By the way, does anyone know how to test a script involving cookies offline, without having a web server running locally?

p. Fruit bowls are strange things. I’m quite a keen fruit consumer, but however much I eat, there always seem to be one or two pieces of fruit which decompose quietly at the bottom of the bowl. Today I discovered an ominous looking kiwi fruit lurking at the bottom, and gingerly picked it up. It squished in a worrying way, and then actually fizzed. It sounded like an alka-seltzer dropped in water—that’s a serious level of fermentation. For a mercifully brief moment, I toyed with the idea of drinking the juice to see if it had produced a decent kiwi hooch. A particularly painful memory of some banana wine I once tasted surfaced just in time, and I threw the fruit in the bin. A luck escape, I think.

p. I was amazed by the number of Police still hanging around on Friday morning. As the coach came past Buckingham Palace, there was a military helicopter flying low over the grounds and a Police officer about every 10m. It was a proper ‘ring of steel’—or rather a ‘ring of fluorescent yellow’ as it was raining and the coppers all had their waterproofs on.

p. I’m no monarchist, but I can imagine the Queen thinking that it was all a lot of fuss over nothing. After all, she lives there all year without the huge Police presence, and still manages not to get herself blown up. She must have rolled her eyes and tried to refrain from saying to Bush, “We stayed here during the Blitz, you know, when doodlebugs were dropping all around. If you can’t deal with a little risk, you’re welcome to turn around and go right home.”

p. I’m of the opinion that security measures tend to invite people to try and break them. People with burglar alarms get burgled because thieves think that they must have something worth stealing. A ‘hard limousine’ is just begging for someone to try firing on it to see just how bullet-proof it is. Judging by the recent fake footman debacle, the Queen is obviously of the same opinion.

p. I’m bunking off work tomorrow to go to the “MacExpo”:http://www.mac-expo.co.uk/ in London. I’ll probably be back late, but I’m hoping to get time for a full report on Saturday. If you’re visiting the Expo and spot a short woman having a Gollum-like argument with herself about the merits and demerits of blowing six months of salary on a [“G5”:http://www.apple.com/powermac/], then do come and say hello. And stop me, please…