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I got the same, un-nameable feeling that I used to get when I was at primary school, and watched seagulls soaring around in the crisp blue sky over the playground. It was something like homesickness, and made me long to be somewhere else. This shouldn’t be taken as evidence that I’m chronically unhappy at work—-I’m fine. It’s just that it seems to have been a long, dark winter, and it’s the Friday after a very busy week, and I’ve had that, “For goodness sake, isn’t it the weekend yet?” feeling for a couple of days.

Sometimes when I’m tired or ill, I can get into a state walking home where my legs are on ‘automatic’, and seem to be disconnected from my brain and the rest of me. I seem to be able to just put the gear stick into drive, and then sit back. It’s almost like traveling in a vehicle, or riding on your father’s shoulders when you were little, or even wearing a pair of Techno Trousers (ex-NASA!). You can look around, daydream or just generally relax while your legs mechanically eat up the kilometres. Weird.

When I moved from Oxford to Birmingham just over a year ago, I managed to sort out most of the administrative changes (like signing up with a new GP and informing people about the change of address) pretty quickly. However, for some reason, I never got around to registering with a new dentist. A few weeks ago, I realised with a shock that it must have been about 18 months since I had last seen a dentist, and signed up with one.

My old dental practice in Oxford was in quite a posh area, and despite the fact that they charged more or less the same as any other dentist, it was very nicely decorated, with polished wood floors, tasteful prints and classical music playing in the background. My new dental practice—-which I visited for the first time today—-looks somewhat more run down. The dentists and dental nurses are very nice and perfectly competent, but the decor looks like a typical NHS GP practice—-slightly tatty.

As I sat in the chair, having my teeth prodded and scraped, I noticed a couple of posters stuck to the ceiling, obviously placed there deliberately to give the victim patient something to look at. One was a nice black and white photograph of the Empire State Building—-a little bit mid-80s Athena, but quite nice. The other one made me look twice—-“World’s Greatest Modern Fighting Aircraft”, depicting about 18 jet fighters. Now, I admire the MiG 19 as much as the next person, but it still seems a bit of an odd choice of decoration. I would have thought that most dentists would opt for a peaceful seascape or a wild flower meadow or something. It had the desired effect though. I spent the whole consultation puzzling over their choice of posters, and so hardly noticed what they were doing.

Friday night is White Russian night chez bsag. Yay! I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have a DVD of The Big Liebowski to hand, so much the better, but if not, you can just imagine that you’re stoned and lying on your rug listening to a tape of bowling balls knocking down pins. Perhaps you are—-I don’t need to know what you do in the privacy of your own home.

Anyway, try it—-it’s an excellent antidote to five tediously consecutive week days.

I got the new issue of MacUser magazine through the post today, and was just flicking through it to see what was being featured when I spotted a report of the MacExpo which had some pictures of the show. Imagine my surprise to find that I was in one of the photographs! I don’t know what the chances are, but when you consider that the show was open for a total of about 24 hours, of which I was present for 4, that there were thousands of people and a huge number of stands, I find it incredible that I’m in one of the shots. Probability is a strange thing.

However, I don’t think that even my nearest and dearest would recognise me—-it’s a distant shot and I have my back to the camera (my best side for portraits, as it happens). It’s only because I know what I was wearing and carrying, and remember talking to the people in the photo that I know it’s me. It did briefly cross my mind that I could post the image here (if I could avoid getting sued for breach of copyright), and run a ‘Spot the Bsag’ competition. Visitors could enter their guess (as pixel coordinates of the image) in the comments, and the closest guess would win a fabulous prize¹. It would be like ‘Where’s Waldo/Wally’, with the added challenge of not knowing what Waldo/Wally looks like.

¹ Something in the style of a school fete tombola prize, perhaps, like a packet of Rich Tea biscuits or a bottle of HP Sauce. ↑

Last week I found myself needing—-if you can believe this—-to buy some Lego® for work purposes. I know, sometimes I have an Interesting Job. Anyway, I wandered slightly fruitlessly around several toy shops and department stores, but couldn’t find a simple set of rectangular bricks of various sizes and a baseboard. There were Lego® dinosaurs, knights, Harry Potters and even Death Stars, but nothing as simple as a collection of bricks.

Just when I had resigned myself to going block-less (and had fretted about the future creativity of today’s children in a slightly pompous manner), I found the Lego® shop and its wall of pick and mix blocks. You pick up a cup (small or large) and fill it up with whatever blocks you like, then pay a flat rate. It’s a brilliant idea, and I had more fun than is seemly for a middle-aged woman collecting supplies for work. Of course, because I had the freedom to pick whatever I wanted, I decided that I had to have blocks of complementary colours. So all of my Lego® creations¹ will be tasteful combinations of grey and white, with accents of royal blue and orange.

¹ Entirely for legitimate work purposes, as I feel I should reiterate… ↑

The bezier pen: he’s a slippery little blighter, isn’t he?

Occasionally I have to use a vector drawing application to produce a diagram of some kind for work, and on those occasions I hope like blazes that the diagram in question doesn’t require any curves because I’ve never got to grips with the bezier pen. Of course, I can form perfectly nice paths with straight segments until the cows come home, but the moment I try to click and drag to form a curve, all hell breaks loose, and the resulting squiggle explosion looks like the outcome of an interaction between a sugar-crazed two-year-old and a crayon. Other people seem to be able to use it to create elegant, expressive lines and shapes, but all I get is a willful tangle.

This time, however, there was no way to get around it, and there had to be curves. So I decided to learn how to use that damn pen properly, once and for all. I did a search, and came up with a few online resources, of which this tutorial was probably the most helpful. I read, and practiced, and stabbed the undo button in a fury, but gradually, I began to see how to control this thing. My ‘eureka’ moment came when it dawned on me that if you want a smooth, symmetrical curve, the control handles need to be the same length as one another, and perpendicular to the curve. Those of you who are pen masters are probably thinking, “Well, duh!” right now, but it was quite an important bit of understanding for me. I think it also really helped me to have some kind of guide about where to put the points, like a circle or ellipse temporarily drawn underneath. Otherwise, it’s very hard to place points properly to achieve the shape you want. I still find it a very unintuitive way to draw, rather than sketching a line (which I’m also hopeless at without a graphics tablet), but it’s gradually beginning to seem less intimidating.

At the end of all this practice, I produced a diagram which had some very respectable—-and practically smooth—-curves in it. I feel quite proud of myself.

Lyle is right—-we get a few days of rain and the so-called railway system collapses. My train was delayed on the way home because (apparently) they were ‘awaiting train crew’, and while we were sitting endlessly at New Street waiting for this mythical entity I got to hear a kind of ‘perfect storm’ of train delays.

Every single announcement involved a delay or cancellation. There were floods in Carlisle, power outages in Lockerbie and other trains also awaiting train crew in other places (have they all been abducted by aliens, or something?). The perfect piece of disruption recursion was the announcement of a delay because the train bringing the crew to the train in question was also delayed. I wondered for a moment how far this went back, and whether it’s possible to bring the entire railway system to a standstill if one driver decides to bunk off and spend the day in bed.

There are times when I manage to do truly idiotic things. Take yesterday, for instance: I went into the city to get hold of a few things, including a set of hand weights. I’m still going the gym regularly, but I wanted to have some free weights at home to do extra arm and upper body exercises. So I went to Argos (‘Home of the Laminated Book of Dreams!’), selected my chosen weights set, paid up and waited at the counter to collect my purchase. It was only at that point that I started to mentally add up the individual weights in the set. “Hmm, 19 kg. That’s quite heavy. And I need to get 19 kg back home on the bus on my own. Hmm.”

The Argos employee who fetched my purchase gave me an “Are you sure you can manage this?” look, but thankfully he didn’t actually say anything. I gave him my best “Hey, I carry 10 boxes like this before breakfast” nonchalant smile, before staggering out of the shop. I got about 50 m in the direction of the bus stop before realising that carrying 19 kg in a cardboard box is just about the least comfortable option available. So I dumped the box on a bench and proceeded to hack into it with my Leatherman¹. It was lucky I had it, because those plastic packing straps are almost impossible to break with your hands. Then I had to decide how to carry six individual weights. I had a rather small rucksack with me, which also contained some of my other purchases, so this was something of a challenge.

In the end—-after several rearrangements which amused passers-by—-I crammed the two 3 kg weights and one of the 1.5 kg weights into the rucksack, held the two 5 kg weights in my hands, along with my Bill Bryson book which wouldn’t go back in the bag after the rearrangement, and the remaining 1.5 kg weight hung out of my jacket pocket. Somehow I made it back like this, with a lot of staggering, resting, and self recrimination for not thinking through the whole endeavour from the start. On the positive side, I did get an excellent work out.

¹ An anniversary present from Mr. Bsag, and proof that he knows me very well. It’s a lovely tool, and I took great joy in using it every day in Brazil. ↑

Well, I suppose it’s nice that it might be sunny at the weekend, but there’s a good few days of very soggy walks back from the railway station there. Last night I discovered that, while my rucksack in which I lug my laptop is shower-proof, it is in no way downpour-proof. Just about everything got a soaking yesterday—-I had wet clothes, squelching socks and even wet bank notes. As I stood on the doormat, dripping quietly, I once again wished for a personal, rain-proof force field, but I suppose I’ll have to make do with a GoreTex jacket for now, like everyone else.

I started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything today, and before I’d got thirty pages in, I was distracted by a thought (which is why it sometimes takes me a long time to get through books). The passage I was reading was about the Big Bang, and how time and space begin at that precise moment:

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there—-whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there for ever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past from it to emerge from. (p. 28)

Now, this isn’t a new idea to me, and I can see the logic to it perfectly well; time and space were created in the Big Bang, so neither could have existed before the Big Bang and it came—-literally—-out of nothing. Fine. Only it isn’t fine. When I try to imagine nothingness, my brain sneaks in some container for the nothingness, or some frame of reference. When I try to insist that it really is nothing—-not just an absence of something filling something else, my brain whimpers and tries to hide. I assume that I’m not the only one, so why do we find it so hard to imagine true nothingness? Our brains just don’t seem to be able to cope with the concept.

Science has pushed back the boundaries of what we have to try to imagine and visualise, so perhaps this is a temporary deficiency, and we’ll eventually be able to do it. I’d be interested to hear from physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists and see how you cope with imagining the unimaginable. I wonder if this inability is behind some of our spiritual beliefs? If you can’t imagine nothingness after death, you create a container—-heaven or hell.

By a huge coincidence, I spotted a highly relevant sight gag in the episode of Futurama I watched today on DVD. The planet Eternium (Nibbler’s homeworld) is shown from space, with the caption, “Inconceivable Dimensions Not Shown”.

[First published 08/11/2002]

In the little coffee room on my floor at work, a fridge-freezer has just appeared. It’s a standard domestic model, only distinguished by the sign on the door.

“Experiment in progress. Do not open.”

I am aflame with curiosity. What’s the experiment? Why is it taking place in a fridge? What dreadful calamity would befall me if I took a peek? Is it all a Cunning Plan to stop people stealing this guy’s milk? I guess this is why scientists can get into so much trouble. One minute you’re thinking, “I wonder what would happen if I dropped a lit match on this large heap of grey powder?”, and the next moment all that’s left is a pair of smoking boots.

[First published 16/11/2002]

I missed capturing a moment as a digital image today, because I didn’t have my camera with me. So, here it is translated by my brain from the image formed in my eyes.

Our bus approached a deep flood in the road, water arcing up on each side. Kids in grey hoodies ran alongside, exhilarated, trying to get soaked, dolphins surfing the bow wave. Sun shattered the water drops into sparks, igniting their smiles.

I realized afterwards, with sadness, that I’ve reached an age where I would have been angry, not excited if I were in their position. But, I did see the moment of beauty and appreciate it, so perhaps I’m not irredeemably lost.

We did some more work in the garden over the weekend, and I planted some lettuce seeds in one of the beds. When I got home from work today, I went out in the garden to have a look at them, which was slightly ridiculous. I knew perfectly well that nothing would have germinated in 24 hours, but I wanted to look anyway. Growing plants from seeds is such a magical process, even if you know—-in theory—-how it works.

As I stood casting an encouraging, “grow, please” eye over the beds, it started to rain, and I suddenly caught that fleeting, subtle, exhilarating smell of the first rain drops on warm tarmac. I breathed deeply, enchanted and surprised by it, because it’s a smell that I associate with the heat of summer. Then I realised that I was getting unpleasantly soaked while standing mere metres away from a dry sofa and tea making facilities, and went inside. So much for my Earth Goddess moment.

I’ve had one of those weekends where almost everything I’ve tried to do on the computer or with anything electronic has gone wrong. My computer has crashed twice while I was in the process of putting it to sleep, some work I was trying to do on Tracks [hasn’t worked out][1] and I don’t know why, and—-most aggravatingly of all—-my phone keeps crashing.

By lunchtime today, I had reached my tolerance limit, and wanted to deal with something for a few hours that couldn’t crash. Some friends of ours are in the process of moving house, and have been tidying up the garden and dividing plants. They came round this morning to give us some of their spare plants¹. So we spent a very therapeutic few hours in the garden, weeding, planting and trying to rip ivy out². Ivy is amazing stuff; as you pull big lumps of it out, more seems to appear from nowhere, like one of those handkerchief ropes old-fashioned magicians produce from people’s ears.

The garden is looking surprisingly neat now, and delving about in non-crashing soil for a while did me the world of good. We also found a gorgeous bee on one of the new plants. It had beautiful orange ‘fur’ on its thorax and abdomen, and its head and legs looked like black velvet. I’ve just looked it up and found out that it’s a [Tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva)][2]. I hope it likes its new home.

¹ A note to non-gardening geeks: think warez-sharing, only legal and more muddy.

²Further note to non-gardening geeks: like trying to get rid of spyware.

[1]: http://dev.rousette.org.uk/changeset/68 “The ‘BROKEN’ title says it all” [2]: http://www.insectpix.net/Andrena_fulva.htm “A lovely photograph of Andrena fulva”