but she's a girl...

Photographing wildlife

2010-08-31;T;09:15:0;

I've finally got around to uploading some of my photos from my Brazil trip this summer to Flickr. I've always admired wildlife photographers, but this year in particular, I'm in awe of them. It's incredibly difficult to get good shots of animals: even if the animals in question are not particularly shy, they are either moving too fast (how inconsiderate of them) or sitting in the least well-lit spot in any particular landscape.

I had some great opportunities to take photos of some wonderful animals this year, but I still managed to blow it much of the time. I could try to blame the fact that I've got a compact camera with a not very long lens, but the truth is that I just need to be a better photographer. If I got the animal still and in the right place, I managed to forget to set the aperture or ISO appropriately. If I had everything set up perfectly, the animal moved off at the last minute, just before the shot.

Anyway, I hope that you enjoy the photos, flawed though they are!

The River: Day

2010-08-27;T;20:31:0;

I stand on the wooden pontoon, looking at the river. I am on my own now, and everything is quiet and still except the river itself. The fast, relentless current makes you feel dizzy if you focus your gaze for too long at one spot. I'm determined to have a swim, but I know that it's going to be a challenge to fight the current. The pontoon creaks as I shift my weight, its boards bleached silver-grey by heat, rain and relentless sun.

I am wearing my swimming costume under my clothes, so I strip off quickly before I can chicken out, and walk to the upstream end of the pontoon. From this position, I'll have the easy downstream swim to get accustomed to the water, while still being able to grab the boards for safety. I jump in.

Cold. Breathing in, and in and in, as every cell in my body seems to try to withdraw itself simultaneously from the shock of the cold water. Every molecule of me is alive and everything is suddenly extraordinarily vivid. And... out. Finally, I manage an exhalation, and find to my surprise that the temperature is quite pleasant — brisk, but enjoyable.

I start to swim breast-stroke down stream, parallel to the pontoon. Swimming downstream is absurdly easy in this current. I feel like an otter, a dolphin, a river goddess. Everything is natural and easy. With my eyes near the surface of the water, I feel part of the river, rather than an observer of it. The air is heavy with the smell of the river: a ripe, green, damp, benignly-rotting scent like sweet compost, overlaid with the heady fragrance of jasmine from the plants on the opposite bank. The sound of my breath is amplified by the surface of the water, so that I feel as if I'm wearing a space helmet, and my world feels pleasantly contracted and intimate. I enjoy the contrast of the warm sun on my back and face and the cool water touching the rest of my body. The opaque, caramel coloured water conceals everything within it, but I'm absurdly comforted by not being able to see the many piranhas and caiman that I know are in this stretch of water. If I can't see them, I can let myself believe that they aren't there.

I've reached the end of the pier, and I hang on to the boards of the pontoon with one hand while letting my body unfurl in the current like a blade of grass dipping in the river from the bank. It's time to try the upstream swim. I take deep breaths and prepare to fight as soon as I let go of the pontoon. All trace of the river goddess has been washed away. Now I am swimming as hard and fast as I can just to stay in place, and I get a slight tinge of panic, but I am determined to win this battle. I begin to get the measure of the river, and make painful, slow progress up the pontoon, swimming harder than I've ever swum because the river never stops or slows. At last, I reach the end and grab for the boards, pulling myself in towards this man-made place of safety.

I'm breathing very hard, as if I've been trying to outrun a predator, and it's not at all goddess, otter or dolphin-like, or even very dignified. But I feel alive, supremely happy and heady with achievement. I make a few more laps of the length of the pontoon, exchanging my river goddess persona for my small, squeaky prey item persona at every turn.

Soon, I'm too tired to hold my own in the water, so I move to the pontoon to get out. I find the lowest part, which still appears to loom above me, intimidatingly high. I try to kick my legs hard and propel my body skywards, supported by my arms, but my upper body strength is puny, and the current is sweeping my legs sideways. Perhaps legs first would be easier? I hook one leg on to the flat surface of the pontoon and endeavour to haul the rest of my body after it, but it is hopeless and I get a fit of giggles imagining what an odd spectacle this would present to anyone watching from the bank. Time for Plan C.

I pull myself along to one of the wooden poles holding the navigation lights. I figure that if I grab hold of the vertical pole, then try to hook the lip of one of the big plastic drums which support the floating structure with my big toe, I might just get enough purchase to pull myself out of the water. It feels nearly impossible, and at one point I fear that I am going to have to explain in my pathetic Portuguese how I have broken their navigation lights, but eventually I flop wetly on to the deck like a newborn, panting and grimy with dirt and rust and relief.

I sit on my towel on the deck, feeling the sun dry my skin and enjoying the residual smell of river that lingers on it: distilled and finally still.

Bewildered of Birmingham

2010-08-23;T;15:59:0;

I'm back from my travels, in body at least. The good news is that I do not appear to have any invertebrates making a home in my body like last time¹, and I don't even have that many mosquito bites, considering that my bite count is usually around the 50+ mark. However my brain does not appear to have entirely caught up with me after the long hours of travelling across several time zones.

My circadian clock has evidently given up for the time being, until it can work out when, exactly, the sun is rising this week, thank you very much. Consequently my stomach doesn't know when it should be expecting food, and I find myself waking up wondering a) what time it is, b) what continent I'm on and c) why I am not inside a mosquito net.

It will all work itself out eventually. When I know where and when I am again, I'll write about a few of the experiences of this trip, but until then, I leave you with a Puzzling Thing I encountered on one of my many flights.

I'm an obsessive reader, and usually have some form of reading matter at hand while I eat, particularly if I'm eating on my own. When I don't have anything to read, I'll read the labels on packets, jars and bottles instead. So, on a SWISS flight, I found myself idly perusing the label on the wrapping of my cheese sandwich:

Allergy information: May contain traces of lupins, nuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, soya.

Wait, what? Lupins?

I immediately thought, of course, of Monty Python and the mighty Dennis Moore, which made me giggle and look like a slightly unhinged person laughing at her sandwich wrapping. However, on returning to the welcoming arms of internet access, I find that lupin allergy is a genuine, serious condition, and that lupin flour is used quite widely in 'mainland Europe'². So now I know.

Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, riding through the night...

¹ I came back with a bot fly larva embedded in my foot last time. ↑

² I don't know if it's just me, but I detect a distinct subtext of "those crazy Mainland Europeans, using lupin flour in their bread!" in the reference to mainland Europe on that FSA page. ↑

Off to the wilds again

2010-08-02;T;09:31:0;

I'm flying out to Brazil again this afternoon, having finally finished my packing. For new readers, this is a work trip, supervising students doing their final year projects in the Pantanal region of Brazil. I'll be away for 3 weeks, with no internet access, so things will be very quiet here.

Mr. Bsag is looking after hearth, home and the cats while I'm away, and I'll miss all of them dreadfully. I've got endless hours of travelling (3 flights and one 5 hour minibus journey) ahead of me over he next couple of days, so please keep your fingers crossed for me that all my connections connect!

Sherlock

2010-08-02;T;09:27:0;

I really didn't think I was going to enjoy the new series of Sherlock, which is set in present-day London. Although it stars great actors (Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman), and has both Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss producing, I thought it would be pointless update. I'm glad to say that I was very pleasantly surprised.

It has a few rather preposterous plot points, but then Conan Doyle's original stories also occasionally stretched credibility. For the most part, it's great fun, and both the main characters have survived a 21st Century update rather well. Some aspects of the original stories still apply, unfortunately: there is still a war in Afghanistan, so Dr John Watson's original backstory fits in perfectly. Other aspects of modernisation have been dealt with quite cleverly. Sherlock makes fairly extensive use of email, the internet and text messages, and I like the way that these appear overlaid on the screen as a kind of visible manifestation of Sherlock's thought processes. Even Mrs. Hudson's character now has a clever twist, as their landlady ("I'm not your housekeeper, dear").

It did leave me wondering what Sherlock (yes, I do know he isn't a real person) would have thought of the internet. On one hand, I could imagine him relishing the ease with which he could gather information instantly. After all, in the original stories, he keep extensive collections of newspaper clippings and other information, which he would refer to in the course of his cases. On the other hand, perhaps he might regard it as cheapening the deductive process, by making information too readily available. I'm sure that the Sherlock Holmes obsessives will be arguing about it, but meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the last episode and hoping that they make another series.

Caturday tales

2010-07-25;T;10:33:0;

Mr. Bsag has been away the past week on a printing course in Cornwall, so I've had the bed to myself. I wondered whether the cats would alter their sleeping arrangements, given the sudden increase in available space. Bella usually sleeps at my feet, or on my feet, so that I often wake in the night to find myself scrunched into a foetal position, while Bella stretches out in the bottom third of the bed. Bianca's visits are temperature dependent, and she is also the 'cat who likes to squeeze between two things'¹. In the winter, she sneaks on to the bed in the middle of the night, and we wake to find her curled into an impossibly tiny space between us. It has been very warm, so I was sure she would sleep elsewhere, but I wondered if Bella might move onto Mr. Bsag's side.

The experienced cat owners among you are probably now shaking your heads ruefully at my naivety. "Bsag, Bsag", you're thinking, "why would you expect a cat to do something as logical as moving in to vacated space, rather than squashing into a small part of the already occupied space?" You would be right.

The first night he was away, she slept on his side for a small part of the night, and then — evidently deciding that there were limited opportunities to cause me to scrunch into a ball from that side — moved back to my feet, and stayed there for the remaining nights.

Bianca is less of a handful at night, but often manages to cause chaos during the day. Early yesterday morning, Mr. Bsag called me in a bit of a panic because he had misplaced his coach ticket: could I go in to his email and forward the copy of the ticket he had received to him so that he could pick it up on his phone? We normally keep his studio door shut, because there's so much stuff in there, and the cats cause havoc running around on printed work, bits of paper and so forth, but I was in a rush and couldn't stop Bianca slipping in.

In the time it took me to wake up Mr. B's computer, find the email and forward it to him, Bianca — purring madly all the while — had: strolled around on the desk and found a rubber band which she tried to eat and I had to rescue and hide in my pocket; knocked over a jar of brushes; and played with a couple of USB flash drives, knocking them off the desk and into the bin. Sometimes it's like babysitting a particularly destructive and talented toddler.

¹ If there is a large sofa, with two cushions placed close together in the middle, she will invariably squeeze between the two cushions. ↑

Ikea hacking

2010-07-19;T;18:11:0;

We've been thinking about rearranging our guest room/home office for a while. When we originally set the room up, Mr. Bsag needed (for one reason or another) to have his iMac in the office, and I needed a desk too for my laptop, so we put together a couple of quite large desks with Ikea Vika desktops and legs. That didn't leave much room for the double sofa bed to be unfolded, and it wasn't really a good use of space. However, we've recently been able to move the iMac into Mr. Bsag's little studio, so that meant I could scale down the desk and get rid of the one of the horrible fibre-board desk tops which had started to bend badly.

I spent quite a long time trying to design an elegant but space efficient desk. I like to have room to write with a notebook and pen if necessary, but I also like to keep the surface as uncluttered as possible. Another consideration is cat-proofing. The cats like to stroll around on the desk, and sometimes view the open laptop as a tempting looking, warm surface on which to curl up. While I like having the cats on the desk (nothing cures writer's block more quickly than a cat sitting a few inches away and just staring at you) I wanted to discourage them from lying on either the laptop or my external keyboard.

I noticed that the Lagan kitchen worktop (solid beech) was very cheap and just the size I was looking for. That set me thinking about other kitchen components which I could use for my desk setup. A little lightbulb came on when I spotted the Asker rail range, and in particular, when I realised that the aluminium dish drainer was a perfect size to hold my laptop off the surface of the desk, with room underneath to slide the external keyboard when I'm not using it.

We had a trip to Ikea to get all the necessary stuff (only one circuit this time!) and I had a busy couple of days putting everything together. I took the legs off the old desks, and reused the biggest desktop to replace Mr. Bsag's work desk in his studio. I put the Vika Kaj legs on the Lagan worktop, then put up the Asker rail so that the laptop sitting on the dish drainer is the right height when I'm working at the desk. It leaves a gap underneath that's too small for cats to comfortably squeeze under, but perfect for sliding my keyboard under, which gives me more desk space if I want to use paper and pen. The Asker clips and containers are great for getting all the desk clutter off the surface, holding Post-It pads etc. I fixed up a Jansjö LED wall lamp on the right hand wall, which is small, but provides perfect, glare-free task lighting for working at night.

I had used a Signum cable basket on the original desk, so I transferred that over too, mounting the powerstrip on the wall and resting the USB hub and my 2.5" external hard drive in the basket too, which gets them out of the way. I'm really pleased with the setup, and it gives us much more space which I'm sure our next guests will appreciate.

It's easy to hate Ikea for homogenising interiors with their mass produced stuff, but actually a lot of their furniture is eminently hackable — there are some excellent examples on Ikea hacker. A lot of items are cheap enough that you don't worry about chopping them up or using them for unusual purposes, so it's a good way for those relatively unskilled at DIY (like me) to put a custom piece together.

Benjamin Zephaniah

2010-07-18;T;11:14:0;

A couple of weeks ago, we attended this year's Baggs Memorial Lecture on the theme of Happiness, delivered by Benjamin Zephaniah. I'm fond of the series (I think leaving a bequest for an annual lecture on Happiness is a brilliant idea), and I really enjoyed the lecture in 2008 given by Andrew Motion. Despite both being poets, Motion and Zephaniah couldn't be more different. While Andrew is quiet, cerebral and extensively educated, Benjamin is exuberant, political and self-taught, having left school at the age of 13. I love the work of both poets, but it's a particular treat to hear Zephaniah perform his poetry because of a lot of the art of Dub Poetry is in the rhythm.

He seemed pretty amused to be giving a 'lecture', given his rather curtailed contact with formal education, though he does now have an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Birmingham. He decided to just do it his way, and talked very engagingly about his life, what had made him happy and unhappy along the way, and interspersed this with poems.

It's funny how what can seem overwhelmingly daunting to one person seems natural and easy to others and vice versa. He read out the first poem of the night from a sheet of paper, explaining before he did so that he doesn't like to read poems, because he's quite severely dyslexic and he ends up getting anxious about stumbling over the words. He read it beautifully, but then later in the evening he performed (without notes) a long and very fast poem called Money, which was word and rhythm perfect. Reading out a written poem wouldn't worry me too much, but I would never be able to remember such a long poem and deliver it so smoothly, and the prospect would terrify me.

It was a really entertaining evening, and certainly made me happy. At one point, he even managed to get a bit of audience participation. He performed De Rong Song and got us all to call out the 'Don't worry/Be Happy' refrain. And sound like we meant it! On a Monday!

He comes across as the kind of guy who would be very interesting to talk to. Along with good vegan food and making other people happy, he said that one of the things that he most enjoys is good conversation. Most of what he has learned has come through talking to people, and that he particularly enjoys conversations with those who disagree with him: he doesn't always change his mind (or theirs), but he likes to hear the other side of the argument.

LibraryThing

2010-07-04;T;17:08:0;

I've been using blippr for a while to record what films I watch, what music I listen to and what books I read, displaying the most recent in the sidebar here. However, I've found that it simply doesn't list a lot of the books I've read (films seem to fare better), and while you can add new items, it's a bit of a chore, and I've had one or two books that I just could not seem to add to the system.

I started looking around for alternatives, and came across LibraryThing. It may not be the prettiest site in the world (though it's not bad by any means), but it is really full of features. You can add books in multiple ways (the easiest of which is to type in the ISBN, or buy a cheap USB barcode scanner from them which integrates with the site), and it pulls in full details. There are no end of customisation options, including choosing which of the localised Amazon sites to pull information from¹, and the ability to add books to different lists such as Currently Reading or Wishlist. The blog widget is also highly customisable, and I chose one showing my reviews.

The social aspects of the site are very impressive: it can generate recommendations, you can join groups with particular reading interests, and the sheer number of reader reviews (many of which are very detailed and thoughtful) provide a lot of scope for future reading matter.

Using blippr was convenient because I could log all my watching, reading and listening in one place, but LibraryThing just seems a better choice for my reading style. Though the short form 160 character reviews of blippr good in many ways because they are easy to write, it's sometimes nice to write a longer review, which you can do on [LibaryThing][]. You can view my catalogue here, though it is currently rather small. I'm not planning on going through my bookshelves to add things, but I'll add new reads (and items to my wishlist) as I go along. If any of you are LibraryThing users, do let me know what your username is, because I'd love to look at your catalogue.

¹ It may be borderline obsessive, but it irritates me when sites which find cover images pull up ones from US releases, because then it doesn't feel like my book, film or CD. LibraryThing can use a UK site so you are likely to get the right cover, but you can also easily choose alternative covers. Why yes, I do organise my CDs and vinyl alphabetically... ↑

iPhone 4

2010-06-28;T;17:50:0;

If you've been following my rather over-excited tweets, you'll know that I recently got a new iPhone 4. I might not have bothered to upgrade, but for the fact that Mr. Bsag's phone (a Palm Treo) was failing rapidly and he was very keen to have my old iPhone 3G. Since I was outside my contract with O2, it seemed a good time to upgrade. I'm really glad I did. I bought it direct from Apple (unlocked), and just continued with my Simplicity tariff from O2, which is a rolling monthly contract you can cancel at any time. I was lucky to order before the rush, and it was delivered on Thursday, so I didn't even have to queue to get hold of it.

There have been many excellent reviews of the new iPhone over the past few days, so I'll just give you my initial impressions after living with the phone for a few days.

Design

The new design is rather lovely. When I saw the photos of it, I wasn't sure whether I liked the rather square, flat shape, but as with many Apple products, it's much nicer in person. It feels solid and high quality in some indefinable way, and though it takes a little while to get used to holding it after the curvier shape of the 3G, it is very comfortable. Before anyone asks, I do tend to hold the phone in my left hand (though I'm right handed — not sure what's going on there), and no I don't get the reception problems many people have talked about. I find myself polishing it quite a bit in a rather obsessive way, but I haven't felt the need to keep it in a case all the time, as it does give the impression of being able to handle life au naturel.

Screen

The so-called 'retina display' is really amazing. It may have a slightly daft name, but the clarity and sharpness is astounding. Even tiny thumbnails have all their details visible¹, and text is really easy to read, even at small sizes. As many people have said, it looks as though the display is printed on the front face of the glass. I'm sure that the novelty will eventually wear off, but for now, every time I turn it on, I utter an involuntary, "Woah!". I quite enjoyed reading books on the 3G (in Stanza) before, but now it is a real pleasure. In fact, reading anything (or viewing photos or videos) is a pleasure.

Camera

The camera on the 3G was pretty awful: it really failed in low light, it was low resolution, and the shutter lag was so bad that it was practically impossible to get a good shot. The iPhone 4 camera is really very impressive on all counts: I would never have been able to get a shot as good as this on the old phone. I have my Canon PowerShot G10, and will always prefer that when it comes to taking 'serious' photos, but sometimes you need to grab an image quickly with the camera you have to hand, and the iPhone 4 now produces really nice images in that role, rather than consolation prizes that make you wish you had your 'proper' camera with you. I haven't tried out video recording yet, but expect a flood of mind-numbingly boring cat videos from me any time now...

Speeeed

If you have previously owned a 3G or an original iPhone, the step up in speed is incredible. I didn't feel that the 3G was slow exactly, but the iPhone 4 makes it seem like a tortoise. Jumping between apps, browsing the web and moving around in email all happens so instantly that you forget you're doing all this on a phone. The whole UI is much more responsive, and therefore feels more immersive, as people who have tried the iPad have also noted. The faster processor and increased RAM speeds up synching over the air for those apps with that feature, and even synching with iTunes seems to happen much faster.

Overall

I have loved my iPhone to bits. I had owned several PIMs (a very outdated tech niche now) and smartphones, but the iPhone was the first that I actually ended up using all the time, for many different purposes, and the first to actually make syncing data with my computer effortless. If you can't sync contacts, calendar entries, email and bookmarks effortlessly², you don't do it, and so you end up not using the device because you're not confident that you've got the latest data. They are expensive devices, but I definitely feel that I get value for money out of them because they replace so many other devices, and open up opportunities for activities on the move that would not have been possible previously. When I bought the 3G, I wasn't certain that it was going to end up being worth the investment, but after living with it for a couple of years, spending money on the new version — and having the pleasure of introducing Mr. Bsag to my much loved 3G — was a very easy decision to make.

¹ I can now read all the letters on the 'index' of the address book depicted in the Contacts icon. ↑

² I use Mobile.me to sync all this stuff over the air, and wish that Apple would include a free account for Mobile.me with each iPhone and provide an easy way for third party developers to sync their data over the air. ↑

The opposite of interested

2010-06-21;T;17:22:0;

I have absolutely no interest in football, and very little in any other sport (with the possible exception of the Tour de France). So you might think that the current convergence of World Cup fever and Wimbledon would be deeply irritating to me. Actually, I'm loving it.

I'm not enjoying the sports coverage at all — in fact, I'm studiously ignoring it all. What I mean is that I'm enjoying being disinterested in it all. It seems to me that supporting England in the World Cup is a short route to certain disappointment. Expecting any British player to win Wimbledon is completely irrational. And yet people who are sports fans continue to get drawn up into the hype, and then continue to get let down. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not a fan. I can laugh heartily when England lose or draw, though I don't do it the faces of fans, because that would be cruel, and in the case of some fans — suicidal.

One drawback of the blanket football/tennis coverage is that there is hardly anything else on TV. But even that can become an advantage: I've done more crochet, read more books, and we've been making steady progress through our Lovefilm queue. Last weekend, I finally watched Withnail & I. How I had reached the age of 40 without ever watching it, I can't explain. It was my ex-PhD supervisor's favourite film, and he frequently quoted various parts of it, so it felt very familiar, even though I'd never watched it. Anyway, it was a great film, and we had a very enjoyable and entertaining evening. Unlike England fans on Friday night...

Feeling the distance

2010-06-06;T;10:52:0;

In the winter, when we had the snow, I walked to work for the first time from our current house. I don't know why I hadn't tried it before: we live quite a distance from the University, but it's a walkable distance. Perhaps the problem was that I knew only fragments of the area between home and work, and simply thought that the distance was too great to make it a practical proposition. Like many people, I know narrow ribbons of routes that I drive or cycle or travel on the train or bus, but I have little real idea how these ribbons relate to one another.

Anyway, the enforced walks during the snow made me see that it was not only possible, but positively enjoyable, and a nice, bracing change from my usual routine. I now try to walk one or both ways to work one day a week, cycling the rest of the time, and I look forward to that day. A whole academic field — Psychogeography — has sprung up to study the effect that walking has on the way that people perceive and feel about the urban environment. Will Self has an interest in this area, and tries to walk from his house to the airport and to the hotel at the other end of his journey, in order to properly experience the distance.

The deeper points of the theory are beyond me, but I do think that walking changes the way that you see an area, and also gives you a better grasp on the real distance between places. We tend to often think of distances in terms of time — often the time taken to get somewhere by car or public transport: "it's about half an hour away", we'll say. However, the real distance is how long it would take you to walk, and how much energy that would cost you. After all, if society crumbled and you could no longer rely on motorised transport, or even mechanical devices like bikes, the one thing you would have left would be your own feet. Walking may be slow, but it is extremely reliable: I know to within a couple of minutes how long it will take me to walk a familiar route. It's difficult to say the same about driving, taking the train or even cycling, though delays are less frequent on a bike unless you have a mechanical problem or a puncture.

I've always enjoyed walking. I like the mindless, repetitive, putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other aspect of it, which frees your mind to think about other things. I often solve problems, have ideas or get a new perspective on things which have been worrying or irritating me as I walk, but I'm not just focussed on internal things. You have time, while walking, to look around you and notice things. I admire the flowers in people's front gardens, watch the play of light through trees and listen to bird song.

When people at work find out that I sometimes walk to work, and how far it is, they look at me like I'm crazy, but I think it makes perfect sense. I arrive at work (or home) a bit tired, but knowing exactly where I am, how I got there, and the real distance I have covered. Everything feels more real, more solid and better connected, in an odd way. It's also great exercise. It may take me over an hour to walk one way to work, but many people take an hour out of their day to get in their car, drive to a gym and spend an hour running or walking on a treadmill, going nowhere and staring at a wall or mirror. That's crazy.

Pomodoros and Tinderbox Daybook revisited

2010-05-25;T;17:28:0;

I've been using Tinderbox for a while as a daybook and also as a kind of task timer to help me track what I spend my time on at work (purely for my own interest and education rather than for billing purposes, as many people do). However since I wrote those articles, I've altered the file a bit, and also discovered the Pomodoro Technique, which I'm finding really helpful, so I thought I'd write a bit about how I use the two together.

First, you probably need a bit of background about the problem I was trying to solve. Like many people, I find it very hard to concentrate on long, open-ended tasks which require a lot of focus. Writing grants and papers, reading and making notes on long articles and marking huge stacks of exam papers all require intense concentration, and it's very easy for your attention to get hijacked by checking email, feeds and the black hole that is Looking Stuff Up On The Web. Eventually, your mind ends up flitting like a butterfly between tasks, accomplishing nothing. At the same time sitting down and actually starting with an empty editing window to write something is intimidating. It's so easy to procrastinate and do some other (less urgent or important) task to delay the inevitable moment when you have to actually fill the window up with potentially Nobel Prize winning science¹. Second, I can be quite bad at estimating how long a task will take, particularly the kinds of tasks I mentioned above. That makes it harder to schedule my work, and leaves me a bit demoralised.

The Pomodoro Technique is a simple set of rules devised by Francesco Cirillo in the early 1990s to address the same problems. You can read about the technique on the site, but it comes down to these simple things:

You decide what to work on
You set a timer for 25 minutes (the 'Pomodoro', from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Francesco used)
You work intensely while the timer is ticking, noting down any interruptions to your train of thought
When the timer rings, you stop, even if you haven't finished the task
You take a 5 minute break and do something else that doesn't require focus
You start the cycle again, continuing the task or starting a new one as appropriate.
Every 4 Pomodoros, you take a longer 15 minute break.

The idea is that Pomodoros are atomic units of work: you can't divide them into smaller units. If you get irretrievably distracted during one, you have to abandon it and start again². In the rest periods it's THE LAW that you do something restful and relaxing, so you have permission to release your butterfly brain to flutter about where it likes, but only for a limited time. Likewise, the limited, 25 minute period of focus is not intimidating, and it becomes like a game to try to race the ticking clock and finish whatever you're doing. I thought that stopping dead after 25 minutes would break my concentration, but actually I find that starting another Pomodoro after a break is exciting and I'm raring to pick things up again.

Since the Pomodoro plus break is always 30 minutes, you can estimate how many Pomodoros you can fit in the day around appointments, meetings and so forth, and then work out how many Pomodoros each task will take and slot them in accordingly. If you record how many it actually takes, you can use the discrepancy to get better at estimating your workload over time. I've found that I'm quite accurate on some things, and underestimate by as much as 100% on others: understanding and compensating for this has been very useful.

Once I realised how useful this technique was to me, it made sense to work the process of recording and estimation into my Tinderbox daybook, so I adjusted the structure a bit. I now have a top level container called 'To do today', which sets the prototype of notes within it to 'pomodoro'. This sets the colour to red and sets some key attributes to record estimated and actual Pomodoros, number of interruptions and how many times I had to reset. I set this up at the start of the day, picking from my todo list and trying to estimate how long each will take. I use a display expression to alter the title of the container to show how many are estimated and how many done to keep track during the day. While I'm working on each task, I keep the note open, and use it as a scratch pad to jot down any thoughts. If I get interrupted by suddenly remembering something else I need to do, or the task becomes more complex, I throw a note about this into the 'Unplanned and urgent' container, and then reassess it later.

I open a separate outline view on the To do today container, and use the new checkboxes to mark things as done as I go, which provides extra motivation. I now make a container for each day, automatically named with the date, and a display expression to record how many Pomodoros were completed that day. I also have a number of Dashboard agents which collect and display the information on my performance over the past couple of weeks. During the day, I add any notes about things that crop up to the day container, which makes it easy to check back with a search and find out when I first heard about X or Y. At the end of the day, I apply a stamp to all the completed tasks, which moves them into the day container and colours them green for added cheerfulness. Any tasks I haven't finished remain in the To do container, and I review them the next day.

This system seems to be working really well for me, and even exam marking hasn't been as painful this year as in previous years. I've got quite good at estimating how many scripts I can mark in one Pomodoro, and having the clock ticking (literally) has helped to keep me focused. Meanwhile, my love and admiration for Tinderbox deepens. Its real strength is that all the data I had in my previous daybook incarnation is still there, and still accessible: all I've done is to use agents and containers and so forth to view it in ways that I never would have foreseen when I set it up.

¹ Ha! I wish... ↑

² So you can imagine that when a colleague or a student knocks on your door 5 minutes before the end of a Pomodoro, stabby thoughts ensue. ↑

Grave of the Fireflies

2010-05-19;T;17:40:0;

There are some films you watch and think that they are very good indeed, but you then more or less forget about them a few days later. Others stay with you forever, etched on your memory. Grave of the Fireflies is one of the latter kind for me. I had heard that it was a very depressing film, but actually, I think it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. That isn't to say it isn't sad — if you sit through the whole film without crying or at least feeling very moved, I would be amazed (and secretly suspect that you have no compassion for others).

Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka) is a Japanese animated film set in the Second World War, and is about two siblings: Seita (about 14 years old), and his 4 year old sister Setsuko. They are left on their own, homeless, after an American bombing raid on their town, and the film is really the story of their relationship and the way in which Seita tries to protect and care for his sister.

There's the spoiler of all spoilers in the first few minutes of the film, but in a way that sets up a kind of happy-sad ending for the film at the start, and you are no longer tense, wondering what is going to happen, but just sit back and watch how it happens.

The animation itself is gorgeous and quite realistic (no huge-eyed animé munchkins here), but the characterisation of the children is even more impressive. They act exactly like real children of their age, and that makes it even more heartbreaking. I loved the way that Setsuko swung her legs happily while sitting on a chair or bench or crouched down to inspect ants on the ground. Similarly, Seita is every inch a teenage boy, albeit one who shows incredible tenderness towards his little sister. At several points throughout the film, Seita opens a tin of fruit sweets for Setsuko. It's such a simple thing, but she adores the sweets and her little fingers can't open the tin, so it's the perfect symbol of his love for her. Actually, just thinking about those scenes again brings a lump to my throat now.

Despite having a rather tragic theme, Grave of the Fireflies manages to steer a very delicate line, and never stoops to exploitative horror (though it is frank about the results of war), nor does it ever resort to sentimentality. Difficult scenes are handled very sensitively and the emotion comes from small details or juxtapositions, rather than dialogue or from either of the characters crying.

I could pick out many wonderful scenes (burned on my memory after only one viewing), but I will mention one that particularly struck me. It is the first night that Seita and Setsuko spend alone in an old bomb shelter that they have made their home. Setsuko has already fallen asleep, but Seita is lying awake. You can see that after all the activity and even excitement of settling in to their new home, he suddenly feels the full responsibility and loneliness of his position. He may try to be a big tough man, but he's only 14 and he misses his parents and his home and feels very alone. Seeking comfort, he rolls over to hug Setsuko, but she sleepily and grumpily pushes him away and tells him to get off her, so he rolls back and curls up.

That — and several other scenes — broke my heart.

Arch Linux and XMonad

2010-05-15;T;14:18:0;

Warning: Geekery ahead!

I've been meaning to write for a long time about the EeePC 1000HE I got last August and Arch Linux. When I got the netbook, I installed Arch, and used Awesome as a window manager. It worked well, but then — in a fit of curiosity and tweakery — I decided to try out Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a nice distribution, specially designed for netbooks, and every single feature on the EeePC worked perfectly out of the box. However, I missed the elegance of Arch Linux, and more importantly, the long battery life. I may have had something misconfigured, but with Jolicloud, my battery life was around 4.5 to 5 hours, whereas with Arch Linux and Awesome, I was getting 8 hours with WiFi switched on and more than 9 hours with it off. I'm going to be using the netbook in the field in Brazil this year, where power outlets are sparse and power cuts frequent, so I recently wiped the drive and reinstalled Arch Linux.

Arch is a very clean and elegant distribution, where you basically get only the barest of essentials by default, and then build your system up the way you want. Consequently, it's not ideal for beginners, but it is a great way to learn about maintaining and configuring a system, and it's brilliant for netbooks, where you want to minimise resource use. Although it is not a beginner's distribution, I have to say that the wiki and forums are the best around, and I've always found the answer to my questions there. I think it's telling that when I've been Googling for answers to some non-Arch related Linux questions, results from the Arch Linux wiki or forum have always featured prominently, and have always been useful.

Anyway, I had obviously learned a bit the first time round, because this installation and configuration session went much more smoothly, and I've managed to get the things I had issues with last time (like hibernation and font configuration) properly sorted out. I've also started using XMonad as a window manager. Like Awesome, it's a tiling window manager, meaning that it automatically organises placement of your windows for you, and allows you to use just the keyboard to navigate and manage them. I liked Awesome, but for some reason, I had a hard time modifying the configuration to my liking, without totally breaking things. I thought that XMonad would be even harder, because the configuration file is in Haskell — a language I don't know. Haskell turned out to be easier to understand than I thought, and because you can set up your configuration to override some of the default settings (rather than having to write a full, replacement configuration), the file can be quite concise and easy to write and maintain. I've got a couple of very thin status bars as you can see in the screenshot above (and here) which take up very little vertical space, and there is no window chrome which all means that you maximise the screen space for content — important on such a small screen.

I think that I've got things set up the way I like now. I've got very few applications with GUIs (just Chromium, gVim, Inkspace, Gimp, evince, OpenOffice (for emergencies) and TeXMaker), but I have some nice command line applications. I'm using mc for file management, feh for image viewing (and setting the desktop background), R for statistics and graphs, irssi for occasional IRC use, scrot for screenshots and twidge for Twittering. I've also managed to set up Dropbox as a daemon, with the dropbox.py script to check status and other things, so that I don't need a panel or dock.

I find this barebones system oddly bracing and refreshing. On the Mac, I love the way that everything Just Works, and the fact that the applications are so beautifully designed (aesthetically and functionally). Arch Linux is almost the opposite of that (with the exception of the functional part): things work very well, but only if you configure them yourself, and the command line applications I have chosen, while beautiful in their own way, are completely different from their Mac counterparts. There is occasionally a bit of mental crashing of gears going from one to the other, but more often it is a refreshing switch, like having a cool shower. The stripped down system suits my little netbook (nicknamed 'Archie' of course) very well.