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We went away for the weekend to see some friends and celebrate a 40th birthday (not mine, I’m glad to say). It was a brilliant weekend, and any time in which the six of us weren’t eating wonderful food, drinking or laughing (or all three) was spent in our friends’ new hot tub. Just before we went out for the best curry I’ve ever had in my life, we were lounging in the hot tub, drinking champagne. The following exchange occurred:

So, are you OK?

[Huge grin on his face, glass of bubbly in hand] Weeelll, I’ve been worse….

No kidding. I think we’ve all been worse, and it was pretty nice to spend a weekend being much better. It made me realise how lucky I am; not just to know someone who owns a hot tub, but to have such a nice bunch of people to spend time with.

I have to face facts; when it comes to exercise, I’m fundamentally bone idle. The only reason I got any exercise when I lived in Oxford was that I cycled to work, so I had to pedal. Since I’ve moved to Birmingham, I can only get public transport to work, so apart from a walk of about 30 minutes back from the station, I get practically no exercise at all.

I decided that this had to change. The University has a very nice sports centre, and membership for students and staff is much cheaper than it would be to join a commercial gym, so I’ve signed up. My goal is to go to the gym or swim at least four days a week. Ideally, I want to do gym sessions on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, with a swim on the intervening days. It’s ambitious given my previous lack of significant activity, but I want to get into a routine. Even if I initially only swim for a short while, or do a fairly easy weights session, I want to get into a habit.

Which brings me on to my second point; why does anybody try to start a new routine (exercise or anything else) in the New Year? It’s probably the very worst time try and change habits, particularly if they involve going out into the cold very early in the day. In contrast, mid-summer seems to me the perfect time to start something new. You have long days encouraging you to be active, and even getting changed for a workout is less of a hassle when you’re just wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

My plan is to get myself into enough of a routine now that when my enthusiasm becomes paper-thin in the the early winter, sheer habit—-and a reluctance to lose all the fitness and muscle tone I hope to have built up by then—-will get me through it.

As I commented here, I was out on Saturday night, and so couldn’t watch the last episode of Doctor Who live. I set up the video (obviously), but was paranoid all evening that something would go horribly wrong, and I’d never know who, what or where Bad Wolf was. I watched it on Sunday, but it’s taken me a few days to think what I want to say about the ending. So here it is.

Spoilers ahoy, so if you haven’t yet seen the last episode of Doctor Who and want to, don’t click through to the rest.

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…feel the amps.

Just occasionally you stumble across something that something could have been made with you in mind. What, I ask you, could be more appropriate for a geek girl than jewellery made of electronics components? I love this diode choker.

[via Gizmodo]

One of the perks of academic life is occasionally getting to go to very cool places in the name of work. One of the downsides of this—-particularly if you are going to be forced to rely on your own resources somewhere fairly remote—-is that you sometimes have to learn new languages. So, I’m currently trying to learn Portuguese. To be precise, Brazilian Portuguese.

I’m not very good at learning languages; or rather, I’m not very good at writing or speaking other languages. I do, however, manage to get the basic gist of written or spoken languages which are based on Latin (thank you, Latin teacher). I got a ‘Portuguese in Three Months’ book from the library, but I only have two and a half months—-how do you rate my chances? Not good, I think. It was clear after a couple of pages that pronunciation was going to be the most tricky bit. I’ve spent some time with Brazilian and Portuguese colleagues in the past, and got the vague impression that a lot of ‘shoosh-ing’ and ‘zzush-ing’ was going on. Unfortunately, I didn’t pay enough attention at the time.

To help me ‘get my ear in’, I decided to buy a ‘teach yourself Brazilian Portuguese’ audiobook from Audible. It’s fantastically repetitive. After listening to the first few lessons—-in which an American man attempts to chat up a Brazilian woman in a really lame way—-these were my inner thoughts:

[On recording]: “Ask the woman if she understands”. (Man’s voice) “A senhora entende?”. (Woman’s voice) “Não senhor”.

[After something like the 50th iteration of this, with minuscule variations]: “Ask the woman if she understands”…

[Me]: For crying out loud… Sim, eu bloody entendo muito bem! I’m just trying to ignore you. And if you ask me ONE MORE TIME whether I understand, you’ll end up wearing that coffee, sunshine.

This whole escapade could end in one of two ways: either it will drive me completely insane, or I’ll learn enough Portuguese to say, “I don’t understand”. Anyway, I’ll keep ploughing on, but if anyone out there speaks Portuguese (particularly if you are Brazilian), I’d love some tips. I also apologise for any grievous errors in this entry. I’m only at about Lesson 3.

I’ve just taken delivery of a spanking new 500GB LaCie Firewire drive for work. I’ve partitioned it in two, with the bulk of the space allocated for video data, but I’ve also made a backup partition for my laptop. I’ve wanted to try using rsync for ages, but I never really had a large enough hard drive spare to try it.

The great thing about rsync is that you can do frequent incremental backups (keeping snapshots of the state of your drive at various time intervals), while not using much more space than a single backup, and while allowing you to easily restore a whole directory structure without having to piece together backup sets.

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Merlin mentioned a plug-in for Mail called Mail Act-On a couple of days ago, and I just got around to trying it out; it’s great. Like many people, I used to use the trick of appending three underscores followed by the name of a key combination to an Applescript’s file name to allow me to trigger it with that key combination. So a script called ‘Flag items___ctl-f.scpt’ would get triggered by using the Control-F hot key. Unfortunately, Tiger broke this little wheeze, and I was getting fed up of having to drag and drop to file messages.

Act-On lets you create specially named rules in Mail which perform actions and can be triggered by a key combination. Even better, if you press the special Act-On hotkey (` by default), it brings up a Quicksilver-like bezel which lists the keys and actions, so you don’t have to remember what activates your ‘File in Project X mailbox’ rule. It’s actually much more convenient than having to create lots of separate Applescripts, though if you want to do something that can’t be accomplished by a Mail rule, you can still use the interface to call an external applescript.

If you use Mail, it’s well worth giving it a try.

The novel is a concatenation of six stories which span a huge period of time from the 19th century to way in the future. However, each story is a cliff-hanger, ending abruptly before passing on to the next. Initially, I found this disconcerting and slightly annoying, as you’re plunged into another time period with an entirely new set of characters and you have to find your feet again. But as the book progresses, you start to recognise the subtle resonances and reverberations that thread the stories together, and the jump to a new time becomes an adventure. About three-quarters of the way through the book, it reaches a climax, and you cascade back through the lives of the six characters again, finding out how they ended (or how it all began, depending on your viewpoint).

Mitchell has an amazing facility for writing in a very natural way in a huge diversity of styles. The first story—-the sea journal of Adam Ewing—-is written in a fastidious and slightly prissy voice, which sounds (to me at least) totally authentic, then there’s the dry wit of a composer in the 1930s and so on. At one point (and I really don’t want to give anything away here), he invents an entirely new dialect, which seems to be have a consistent grammar and vocabulary. Despite these slightly virtuoso touches, he never gets too clever. The links between the stories could be too complete and perfect to be believable, but they’re not.

It’s one of those books that you desperately want to describe and explain in detail to others, but at the same time, you don’t want to spoil their excitement when they read it for the first time. All I’ll say is that it’s broadly about the dangers of greed and the lust for power, and the havoc they can wreak. One phrase—-spoken by one of the characters—-has stuck with me: “Before The Fall was tripped”. Falls (with a capital ‘f’) are rarely entirely accidental, and usually someone has stuck a metaphorical foot out to precipitate it. This book can be seen as a parable about how we humans can avoid tripping.

P.S. I think that this is one of those books that polarises opinion: you’ll love it or hate it passionately. Obviously, I’m in the former camp.

Jason Kottke started another music meme: how many languages are in your music collection? I can’t resist trying to work that out, so I’ve spent some time flipping through my CDs, and come up with a total of about 21 (depending on how you count albums by artists who sing in more than one language):

UK:

• English (obviously)
• Scottish Gaelic
• Irish Gaelic

Scandinavian (or somewhere way up North):

• Swedish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Sami

Other European:

• French
• Italian
• Spanish
• Estonian
• Russian
• Bulgarian
• Hungarian

African:

• Swahili (Tanzania and Kenya)
• Either Lingala, Monokutuba or Kikongo (I don’t know which language Papa Wemba uses on his albums)
• Bambara (Mali)
• Lugana (Uganda)

Asian:

• Tibetan
• Urdu
• Punjabi

Of course, it does help that I like World Music…

Some children have invisible friends; I had invisible pets. I also had real pets, which included everything from hawk moths and stick insects, through a wide swathe of the rodent Order (mice, rats, hamsters—-Russian and Syrian—-and gerbils), cats, zebra finches, a cockatiel, fish and a number of injured or orphaned wild birds that people brought to us. However, I knew that my folks would put their parental feet down if I were to ask for a tiger or an otter—-it was so unfair!

As a result I kept some invisible pets when I was little which included an otter, a Siberian tiger (I was very specific about this—-none of your common or garden Bengal tigers for me, oh no), a golden eagle and a goshawk. I’ve never really spoken to anyone who would admit to having an invisible friend, so I don’t know if children actually believe that these characters are real. I certainly never believed that my invisible pets were real, but I imagined them in extraordinarily clear and vivid detail, to the point where I could almost feel and see them.

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I can’t believe that it’s nearly the end of this series of Doctor Who. Bouncing around on the sofa to the theme tune (and then hiding behind it when things get scary) has become a bit of a ritual on Saturday nights that I’m really going to miss.

The past few episodes have been fantastic. ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’ were wonderful mixtures of funny lines, outrageous three-way flirting between Rose, The Doctor and Captain Jack, and genuinely traumatising scariness. Gas masks are sinister and troubling things on their own, but coupled with a disembodied child’s voice saying “Are you my Mummy?”… Doctor Who gave me nightmares as a child, and now it’s doing the same all over again.

I love the way that the characters have developed over the series. This week’s episode, ‘Boomtown’ was also quite an interesting and serious discussion of capital punishment, and what should be done with people who do terrible, unforgivable things. It was also the first time that the frequent and almost subliminal references to Bad Wolf have been explicitly discussed. They built this up with very menacing incidental music, before the Doctor abruptly grinned and dismissed it as ‘just a coincidence’. But it isn’t just a coincidence, is it? I don’t remember the last time I watched something on TV that set up such intrigue so cleverly.

Next week’s episode is called ‘Bad Wolf’, and there were Daleks (lots of them!) in the trailer. I can’t wait, but I don’t want it to end.

Part 4 of a series

(Read Parts 1 and 2 and 3)

For me, Japanese food is just about perfect; low fat, with plenty of vegetables and fish, it feels very healthy and there are all kinds of interesting new flavours to enjoy. With the exception of the traditional sweets, which have the consistency of taste of congealed and sugared wallpaper paste, I could quite happily live on Japanese food indefinitely.

I did, however, become particularly besotted with one Japanese snack: the onigiri¹. This is a mass of sticky rice, often formed into a fat disc or—-more commonly—-a triangle. In the centre of the rice, there’s some fish like salmon or tuna, or salmon roe, or perhaps a pickled plum. The whole thing is wrapped in dried seaweed (nori), which makes onigiri perfect for eating on the move.

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I’ve just noticed that there’s a very green thing going on in my photographs at the moment (see the thumbnails in the header¹). It must be Spring or something.

¹ This will baffle anyone reading this post in a few weeks time when the photos have all changed.

I mentioned, in an off-hand way, when talking about Backpack a couple of weeks ago that I had got a Sony Ericsson P910i. Those with long memories and high boredom thresholds might remember that I used to have a Treo 600, and might be thinking, “Oh, that Bsag, she’s been hankering after new gadgets again”. Well, it wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t far off.

In our house, the Technology Trickle-Down Process (TTDP) operates. Mr. Bsag isn’t a great one for gadgets and tends to give them quite a hard life, so I get the new gadgets, and when his wear out or break down I pass mine down to him and the whole TTDP starts again. He had an ancient Palm which had developed a very irritating habit of emptying its memory when the batteries were changed. This was fine if he had remembered to back up as the levels were getting low, but he often didn’t remember. He also had an old Sony Ericsson phone (another of my hand-me-downs), which had inexplicably died, and the consensus from our local phone shop was that it couldn’t be fixed¹.

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I watched a fantastic documentary called Alchemists of Sound about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I’ve long admired the Radiophonic Workshop—-both for the quality of their output, and because they seemed to embody the same kind of ‘high innovation on a shoestring budget’ ethos that also typified the British rocket industry of the same period. I’m in awe of the skill and patience required to record and manipulate sounds on to analogue tape, and then cut, splice, speed up, slow down and re-record those loops until you have something that sounds completely unearthly.

The workshop had some—-for the time—-expensive and ground-breaking kit, but they also made a lot of stuff themselves from old tobacco tins and components scavenged from skips, as well as testing lots of everyday objects for their potential to generate interesting sounds. One thing that made me laugh out loud for ages afterwards was an archive shot that wasn’t even commented upon in the commentary. It showed a box with lots of interesting looking knobs, dials and buttons. Attached to one knob was a handwritten label in stern capitals which read, “DO NOT FIDDLE WITH”.

Another reason for admiring the Radiophonic Workshop is that several women played a very influential part—-something that was unfortunately unusual for a technical field at that time. The most famous of the workshop women was Delia Derbyshire, who was a mathematician and musician, and was turned away from Decca Records in 1959 because they said that they didn’t employ women in the recording studios. Their loss. Delia’s most famous piece was the Doctor Who theme, which she arranged from Ron Grainer’s composition. Every time I hear her arrangement, I’m astounded by how modern it sounds. Plenty of people have tried to ‘update’ it, but I think that the best you can hope for is not to mess it up too much. Perhaps it should have a “DO NOT FIDDLE WITH” label on it. Her version sounds grittier and weirder than any of the subsequent synthesised arrangements, and I like the tiny variations in timing that you get with edited tape loops. Sometimes synthesisers are just too regular, and it makes the music seem cold. I also didn’t know before I watched the programme that the bass line in the Doctor Who theme was produced by plucking a string; not a musical string, but just an ordinary bit of string.

They featured some of Delia’s other compositions on the programme, including the slightly creepy ‘Ziw-zih Ziw-zih oo-oo-oo’ and the utterly haunting and evocative Blue Veils and Golden Sands. I must try to get hold of some of her recordings on vinyl.

One of the people interviewed made a very interesting point about technology. He said that in the early days, the imagination of the composers outstripped what the technology was capable of. People had a clear idea what they wanted to achieve, and would work away until they got as close as possible to their vision. However, as technology improved, the possibilities outstripped the imagination of the composers. So now, there’s a tendency for composers working with electronics to try out buttons randomly until they find something they like, which isn’t the same thing at all.