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One of the great treats of going to Brazil is a trip by boat to swim in the river. We find a nice spot with a sandy river beach, ignore the resident caiman, and pile in to the caramel coloured water. The water isn’t cold, exactly, but it feels cool after the roasting heat of the sun. I love the tropics, but don’t care for the heat very much, so I value any opportunity to get cool. The current is surprisingly strong, so you can use the river like a natural, water-treadmill. You thrash away as hard as you can, then find that you’ve made barely any progress relative to the bank, but when you’ve swum a little way, you can let yourself drift back, to start again.

The visibility under the water is very low, which is slightly unnerving. We know for sure that there are a lot of piranhas in the water, and every now and again you get a little, gentle nibble on a limb or your back, which keeps you on your toes. The reputation of piranhas is much more ferocious than they are (for a start, many species are not carnivorous), and it’s quite safe as long as you don’t have any open wounds. Similarly, the caiman just keep out of your way.

I know that it’s not an efficient stroke, but I think that breaststroke is wonderful for wild swimming. You can see where you are going and hear all the bird calls bouncing off the water. As you look ahead, your sweeping hands slice the calm, virgin water cleanly, making you feel as if you’re the first person ever to swim in the water. Even if you’re swimming with others, you can point yourself towards a bit of open water and it’s just you, your hands and the river. Bliss.

I travelled fairly light (for me, anyway) to Brazil, but one thing I was keen to take along was my iPhone. It turned out to be a very useful travel companion for entertainment (music, TV shows and books via Stanza) as well as a stopwatch, alarm¹, calculator, currency converter and various other useful widgets. We had no internet or mobile phone coverage at the site, but the connectivity was very useful during the interminable travelling. I found that with Airplane mode on, the battery life was great. I also took a Freeloader with me, which was brilliant for recharging on the go. The power supply at the place we stayed was not the most reliable, but there was certainly plenty of sun, so the solar panels of the Freeloader charged up its internal battery quickly. I could then recharge the iPhone (and my camera) up at my leisure. It works well in the UK too, though it takes longer to fully charge, but you can also charge it via USB from a laptop.

I lugged a paperback copy of War and Peace to Brazil (875g!), but if I had been a bit more alert, I would have noticed that it is available on Stanza, so I could have taken a weightless literary tome with me on my iPhone.

¹ I recommend ‘Piano Riff’ as an alarm tone. It brings a bluesy, dramatic start to the day, and you wake up composing “I woke up this morning [da-DA da-DUN]…” blues songs. It also goes well with howler monkeys. ↑

We went to the Moseley Folk Festival yesterday, and it was really fantastic. I don’t know why I haven’t been before. I love folk music, and Moseley is only a short bus ride and a walk away from me. Anyway, I’ll certainly be going again next year. The festival is held in Moseley Park, which is a fabulous, fairy grotto of a park, hidden in a valley between rows of Victorian houses. It’s surrounded by trees, and the natural slope of the site makes a good amphitheatre for live music.

All the artists I saw were wonderful, so it’s hard to single people out, but there were several artists (some new to me) who I particularly enjoyed.

Jon Redfern

Jon Redfern has a lovely, delicate style, and a great guitar technique with beautifully-crafted songs that really hold your attention.

John Smith

John Smith: surely the man with the least distinctive name in music, but a really distinctive, rich voice, and a mind-blowing guitar style. He’s one of those artists who is really hard to describe to someone else, because he doesn’t sound like anyone else, but he made my heart break a bit. Which is a good thing, in case you’re wondering. He also has an extraordinary, show-stopping guitar technique where he lays it flat on his lap and employs a kind of extreme tambour stroke to provide a percussion backing. Even though he’s there, doing it in front of you live, it’s hard to believe that he’s getting such an incredible layered sound out of one guitar and two hands. If you’re interested, you can hear it on ‘Winter (Live)’ on his MySpace page.

The Family

The Family describe their music as “swaggering, Bourbon-drenched Cosmic Country music for bow-legged women”, which is a fairly good summary. It’s good-time music that’s a little bit off its head — something like early Beefheart or Canned Heat. They also gave away free CDs, which endeared them greatly to the crowd.

The Destroyers

What can I say. I’ve never had the pleasure before, but now I’m wondering where they’ve been all my life. I’ve got a very soft spot for Klezmer music, which is the basis of The Destroyers’ sound, but they swerve joyfully between klezmer, ska, dub, punk, funk and folk, often within the same song — it’s like an explosion in a music factory. And they have a hurdy gurdy, and any music featuring hurdy gurdy is OK by me. They’ve got a great video (shot in Digbeth!) of their anthem to the joys of multicultural urban life, Out of Babel, which is definitely worth a look. But if you want to see their live style (with a much reduced band), see Rhombus of Righteousness. Little kids (of all ages) love them because you can jump around like a loon to their music — in fact, it’s impossible not to.

Sharron Kraus

Sharron Kraus has a lovely, high, clear voice which she completely subverts by singing dark, dangerous folk songs and murder ballads. Her music manages to sound ancient, like songs passed down through the generations, but she writes all her own material. Excellently creepy.

Chris Wood

I’ve raved about Chris Wood’s music before, so it won’t be a surprise that he was the reason we decided to get tickets for the festival. So it was a shame that his set was so short, and that it was plagued with sound problems. Actually several artists had problems with the sound, which with acoustic music in the open air can really mar the performance. He was also on not long after The Destroyers, so people were still a bit excitable. It must be hard for someone — whose stock-in-trade is a quiet, carefully crafted, emotionally-laden story in song — to get people to shut up and listen. Well, I was listening and hanging on to every note, and he was wonderful. Chris: if there’s a chance in a million (see what I did there?) that you happen to be reading this, some people were listening. And you made me shed a tear with ‘One in a Million’. Again. I’m a sucker for a sweet, romantic story, and it’s the way you tell it. I wish you’d had time for ‘Lord Bateman’ too.

Watching wildlife is often the outcome of random encounters, and your luck never seems proportional to the time and effort you put in. Sometimes you lie silently on your belly on a freezing moor at dawn for hours and don’t see so much as a rabbit, but at other times, you stroll along whistling and almost trip over a rare and wonderful animal. We were quite fortunate on this trip and had a lot of the latter kinds of experiences, including seeing not one, but two, whole anacondas.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: it’s not like in the film. They don’t suddenly lunge up out of the water and consume a boat and its occupants. They are fairly shy, and tend to lay low, quietly suffocating and swallowing smallish animals in private and out of the gaze of curious tourists. They also don’t need to eat very often, so catching them in the act is even less likely.

We saw anaconda 1 on a horse ride. We were gaily wandering through a shallow lake on horseback, when one of the guides jumped off his horse, and started excitedly poking about in the rushes. He’d seen an anaconda which was in the process of constricting around a caiman and eating it. You might think that jumping into the water next to a snake big enough to swallow a medium sized caiman is a bad idea, but doing so while it’s feeding on a medium sized caiman is probably as good a time as any, because the snake is actually rather busy. That was exciting.

The location of anaconda 2 was given away by some jacanas (big-footed water birds, similar to coots or moorhens). They were going crazy with alarm calls, hovering over a particular patch of water and looking very nervous indeed. When we looked through the weeds at the spot they were troubled by, we saw a lithe, yellow, spotted body slipping through the water. We were out of the water this time on a bridge, but one of the guides — in his enthusiasm to show people wildlife at as close quarters as possible (with just a touch of wanting to impress the laydees) — waded carefully in and grabbed the snake’s head, hauling all 2.5 m of it out on to the bridge for us to hold.

I really prefer it when people leave wild animals alone, even if that means you don’t get such a good view. Better a brief glimpse of a wild animal behaving naturally than a long look at one which would really like to go and hide in the water, thank you very much. However, there are times when you can’t get a real impression of the physicality of an animal without seeing it up close and touching it. The warm, dry skin of the snake was beautiful, and the incredible smooth power of its muscles as it gripped our hands and arms was something that just looking at it wouldn’t have conveyed. The guy put it back in the water gently, then backed away carefully. They may not rear up out of the water to attack you, but they do command a certain respect.

(Tuesday 19th August, 5.30am, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil)

It’s 5.30am and the sun is just beginning to colour the eastern horizon a delicate peach, shading to deep indigo at the zenith. The river is very still in the silver half light, and a veil of mist hovers just above the surface of the water. A cool, light breeze drifts shreds of mist, like smoke, towards me, as I stand on the boardwalk watching. On three sides, groups of chaco chachalacas¹ strike up their raucous song, like a drunken military tattoo performed entirely on amplified kazoos, and backed occasionally by a howler monkey chorus. In the brief breaks between chaco sets, I can hear the various whistles, purrs and mews of other birds against the earth-shaking three-note bass growls of caiman the wildlife starts its day. The dawn here is often peaceful, but seldom quiet.

In the west, the full moon is still high, and as the sun rises, the cold, silver moon-shadows are gradually erased and replaced with the deep, warm sun-shadows. Dawn happens fast here: as I watch, the sun hauls itself above the horizon, bloodily dripping and setting fire to the landscape. Another day begins.

¹ They can be heard 2 km away, so you can imagine that when you’re standing right next to them (or vice-versa), conversation is impossible, and earplugs are advisable. I once had to break off a conversation with my colleague because of noisy chacos above us. It’s no use shouting at them, either (I’ve tried) — you just have to wait until they’re finished. ↑

I’m back in the UK after three weeks in Brazil. It was a good trip: the students worked hard and enjoyed themselves, we saw a lot of interesting animals, and my colleague and I made good progress on a grant application. However, it’s a long time to be away from Mr. Bsag, and it’s very nice to be home. When I got back from the airport yesterday and sat down on the sofa with him, cup of tea in hand, I was more content and happy than I’ve been for some time.

One of the real killers with the trip is the travel. Brazil is a fantastic country, but it’s also very, very big. Our return journey took 36 hours in total, involving a 5 hour minibus journey and 4 separate flights. We also had a fair bit of hassle with the flights this time, though thankfully we didn’t miss any of them. I don’t want to get on another plane for a few months, I think!

In my absence, Mr. Bsag has been a whirlwind of productive activity. As well as making a lot of prints, he had arranged for an ugly conifer to be taken down in our garden, got the loft insulated, and even re-painted the hall, stairwell, landing, and the kitchen. It makes me think that I’m slowing him down, but I don’t think either of us could keep up the pace we set when we’re apart and trying to distract ourselves with activity.

It’s that time of year again when and colleague and I take a group of students to Brazil for a field course. I’m off on Monday, leaving — with great reluctance — Mr. Bsag and Cleo to fend for themselves for three weeks. We’re in the middle of nowhere, so it’s very unlikely that I’ll be able to post anyting to the blog while I’m away. As usual, I had intended to make some posts in advance to be published during my absence, but as usual, I haven’t had time. No doubt you’ll all be busy enjoying the nice weather and/or the Olympics, so I doubt anyone will notice

Brazil is a gorgeous country and we’re surrounded by wonderful wildlife, but it’s very intense, hard work, and the heat gets to me after a while. I love the tropics, but I’d like them better if they were a bit cooler! I watched the first episode of Lost Land of the Jaguar this week, and even though the expedition featured is in Guyana, not Brazil, we see many of the same species. I felt slightly smug when they went to great lengths to film giant otters in their totally remote location, when we saw them from a boat about 5 minutes from our hotel. Two years ago, a couple staying at the hotel even saw a jaguar while they were on a boat trip early in the morning. It was sunning itself on the bank, and they got some stunning photographs, which made us wildly jealous.

The area we stay in may not have the same level of biodiversity as the area the team visited in Guyana or be as pristine, but we’re very lucky to see so much wildlife.

Have a good August everyone, and I’ll post about my adventures in about 3 weeks time, bearing (no doubt) the scars of heat rash and numerous insect bites.

Although some of our potatoes are probably not quite ready for harvesting just yet (particularly the maincrop variety), we are impatient and decided to try digging up a couple of of the plants to see how they were doing. Other people on the allotment have been complaining that their yields have been very low this year, so we were pleasantly surprised to get quite a good haul. There are some very tiny ones, but also some that will make more than a couple of mouthfuls. We also — as is traditional when you grow your own — got a few amusingly shaped spuds.

The allotment is going pretty well at the moment, after a slow start. We’ve also got plenty of courgettes (you can see today’s haul in the photo, and we have more in the fridge from earlier in the week), and lots of nasturtium flowers for salads. The tomatoes are coming along slowly but surely, and the runner, Cherokee and dwarf beans are finally coming into flower after sulking for a couple of months.

Digging potatoes is brilliant - you never quite know what’s going to come up, but it feels like digging for treasure.

Reading web pages on the iPhone is a very different experience than reading them the desktop version of Safari. Some things (like entering text and so on) are inevitably slightly more awkward because of the onscreen keyboard. But there’s one thing in particular that I’d like to see in the full version of Safari: zooming in on page elements. For those who haven’t used Mobile Safari, each page is initially displayed full width, which for most pages results in tiny text, but means that you can see at a glance the layout of content on the page. The magic comes when you double tap a page element like a column of text: it expands to fill the entire width of the page, which for most pages I’ve tried makes it perfectly readable. It also — and this is why I want it in desktop Safari — removes any of the other distractions on the page. This is perfect when you’re reading typical sites with sidebars and other content at the side of the page, and is particularly good with online news sites where you have flashing adverts and other distracting elements to either side of the content.

It’s the web browser equivalent of ‘full screen mode’ on a text editor, and I’m rather addicted to it. So much so that I tried double clicking a column in desktop Safari earlier today to concentrate on what I was reading.

One of the dubious pleasures of being an academic is the annual graduation ceremony. On the one hand, it’s lovely to see the students you’ve taught graduating and celebrating their success. On the other, you have to sit through an awful lot of names being called out and hands being shaken. You also have to wear an academic gown and mortar board, which is downright weird when your usual attire consists of jeans and t-shirts. All Universities have different colours for their gowns, and the Oxford PhD gown is spectacularly lairy. It’s bright scarlet and electric blue, so you march solemnly into the hall looking exactly like a female eclectus parrot. In a hat.

The Birmingham ceremonies are quite nicely done, and we even get a brass fanfare as we process into and out of the Great Hall. I don’t know if it’s a long-standing tradition, but the music going in to the Hall is usually fairly solemn and a bit pompous. The music for processing out of the Hall, on the other hand, is often hilariously (and deliberately) inappropriate¹. One year we got the theme from the Dambusters, and this year — hilariously — it was the theme from Thunderbirds. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but it was all I could do not to imitate a Gerry Anderson puppet walk, or pretend to that I was flying Thunderbird 2. Imagine that: a female eclectus parrot, in a hat, flying Thunderbird 2. You can’t say that the Univseristy of Birmingham graduation ceremonies aren’t memorable.

¹ One thing that I love about Brummies and the ethos of the city of Birmingham as a whole is that they refuse to take themselves too seriously. There’s a constant level of dry wit and self-mockery that I like a lot. ↑

As you will have seen if you follow my Twitterings or see them on the sidebar here, I got an iPhone last week. When the original iPhone came out, I fell in love with it, but I couldn’t afford it at the original prices, and I also had a mobile contract to finish first. The timing for the 2.0 version was perfect, as was the reduction in price. With all the hoo-ha over the release (O2 got inundated with registrations of interest), I thought that my chances of actually getting hold of one would be low.

As it happened, I got lucky. I tried to order one online early on Monday morning when O2 started accepting pre-orders. The server went down almost immediately, and as I had work to do, I wasn’t able to try it again until lunch time. Amazingly, my order went through, and unlike many others who were unlucky, when it arrived on Friday by courier and I activated it through iTunes, the activation went straight through without a hitch. I know that others had a much less smooth experience, but for me it worked really well.

I’ve been living with the iPhone for several days now, and I really like it. I’ve been waiting a long time to get a small, mobile device that offers such a seamless experience with my Macs. 3G/Edge wireless works very well, and connecting to a WiFi network is seamless. The screen is beautifully bright and clear, so that reading web pages and emails or viewing photographs is a real pleasure. The touchscreen gestures are wonderfully intuitive and easy to use, and I even quite like the touchscreen keyboard. I’m a touch typist, so it’s never going to replicate the experience of a full sized, physical keyboard, but I think it’s a very effective and efficient compromise for a small, handheld unit. With one or two minor exceptions, everything is as beautifully designed and functional as you’d hope from an Apple product. In the past, I’ve had Psion PDAs (2 different models) and Palms/Treos (3 different models), as well as a clutch of smartphones (as well as some dumbphones). So I’ve had quite a bit of experience with using these kinds of devices, and I can honestly say that I’ve never used a phone/PDA/internet device which gets so much right. People argue that the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Blackberry does everything an iPhone does, has a better camera, better battery life or whatever. But for me, the point is that the iPhone does pretty much everything you want in such a seamless and integrated way that you don’t have to think about it: you just use it.

Of course, it’s terrific when you are out and about and want a burst of information or entertainment in a handy package that you always have about your person. But I’m also finding that I use it at home a lot, where I have a laptop which replicates all ¹ of the functions of the iPhone — even portability. Somehow, if I’m browsing my email or reading RSS feeds or FriendFeed, it seems so much more comfortable to pick up the iPhone, curl up on the sofa and browse through the sites than it does to do the same at the laptop. In short, I find that it’s a device that really delights me, which is a fairly rare thing. I know that there will be someone who comments, “But it’s just a phone!” (Jonathan, I’m looking at you ), and that’s absolutely true. But it’s a beautifully designed, elegantly functional device that I thoroughly enjoy using, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t celebrate that in the same way that I enjoy looking at a Victorian suspension bridge, a beautifully turned ceramic bowl or a beam engine.

¹ Except GPS. ↑

As I blogged about a few years ago, I’m a first aider at work. We have quite a few qualified first aiders in our building, and there were practical reasons related to my job that made getting qualified a good idea for me, but I’ve always been aware of the importance of having some knowledge of first aid. My Mum (a nurse) taught us common-sense stuff about dealing with medical and other emergencies, and I did my First Aid badges in Brownies and Guides, but my qualification 3 years ago was the first time I had fairly formal training.

I went on an annual refresher course this week, and something the trainer said really shocked me. Apparently about one in three unconscious casualties die — not from their injuries, but because their airway wasn’t kept open at the scene before the ambulance arrived. That’s shocking because ‘keeping the airway open’ isn’t technical or difficult at all: all you need to do is place two fingers under the person’s chin, support their forehead and gently tilt their head up and back. That’s it. But a third of unconscious casualties die because no-one thought to do that simple thing.

I think we all have a responsibility to learn a bit of simple first aid. It’s mostly common sense, but if you know how to keep an airway open and stop bleeding (just put your hand over the wound and press hard, as long as there aren’t any foreign bodies in the wound), you’re half way there. If you can do CPR as well (which really isn’t a difficult technique), you stand a good chance of giving someone in a dire situation a much better chance of surviving. All you need to do is keep their brain supplied with oxygen: keep the airway open, keep the circulation going, and stop too much oxygenated blood from leaving their body — anything else can wait until the ambulance crew get there. We should really teach simple first aid to children in school. It’s a vital skill for life — and for preserving life.

We’re growing a lot of tomatoes at the moment. We both love tomatoes and can’t get enough of them, but last year our crop was a dismal failure (grand total of fruits: 1¹ ). So this year, we decided to hedge our bets. We grew half of our plants indoors in our unheated conservatory, and half outside on the allotment. Looking at them now, you’d find it hard to believe that they were the same varieties, let alone the same varieties planted at about the same time.

The indoor tomatoes are like supermodels. Incredibly tall (2 metres or more), leggy and skinny, they continually flop melodramatically all over the place despite being well supported with canes. Every day I come in to water them to find that another branch has buckled and is trailing on the ground having a crisis, or threatening to bring down another plant. They are healthy enough, but I think that the higher temperature and humidity in the conservatory has made the new growth very sappy and soft. They have flowers and a few tiny fruits, but I can’t imagine how they’ll stand up when they have a full crop of fruits weighing them down.

In contrast, the allotment tomatoes are like sturdy hill tribespeople: short with strong stems, tough, leathery leaves and very bushy. They’ve been exposed to the colder temperatures and the vicious winds that whip over our allotment site, and they almost look as if they’d be able to stand up on their own. They are a bit further behind, fruiting-wise, but I think they’ll probably produce a decent crop if we can keep the slugs and pigeons away from them.

¹ Which we cut in half and shared, determined to enjoy our one and only tomato. ↑

When I started using Tinderbox again for planning various work projects, I noticed that a lot of people were using it for a simple daybook or journal. I’ve tinkered with various ways of keeping a record of the various things I do, people I talk to or ideas I have throughout the day, including a simple little plugin I wrote for Textmate to keep a journal in a plain text file. That worked quite well, but it wasn’t as easy as it might have been to find things again when I needed them because it was one big flat file.

So I started playing around with keeping my journal in Tinderbox, and I’ve been using it for a couple of months now. It’s deliberately very simple: I have a container called Daybook, in which all my snippets of text are kept. That container has an OnAdd action which sets the prototype as daybook (setting the colour and a few other attributes), and also sets the title with a datetime stamp of the creation date. That means I can just hit return to create a new note, hit return again to dismiss the dialogue setting the title (because it will be set automatically), then start typing in the window which appears. These daybook entries are sorted in reverse chronological order, and automatically collected by ‘Today’ and ‘Past 7 days’ agents, which do just what you’d expect. I also have another container for completed tasks, where I have one note for each day (again, auto-titled on creation with the date and ‘tasks’) which contains all the completed tasks for that day.

One of the things I really like about Tinderbox is that the DIY ethos of it means that you can make something as simple or complex as you like, and — even more importantly — you don’t have to decide exactly how something should be set up from the start. Once I’d been using the setup I described above for a few days, I realised that it would be nice to collect my notes on articles I’d read in a separate place so that I could find them more easily. The infinitely flexible structure of notes meant that I didn’t have to create a different kind of note to do this, or even go back and edit my previous notes on reading. When I make notes on a paper I’ve read, I tend to first paste in the reference and the link to the entry from the Papers application, so that I can find the original article easily from my notes. So all I had to do was create another agent called ‘Reading’ which searched for notes with the string ‘papers://’ in them, which is the start of the Papers URI format. It would then assign ‘reading’ to the attribute ‘tags’ for that note. Also, by setting the tag manually to ‘reading’ I could get the Reading agent to find the note.

I set up something very similar for bookmarks, so that if I dragged a URL on to a note to remind myself of some online resource, it would be collected by the ‘Bookmarks’ agent. It’s important to note that these agents just store aliases of the original notes, so that all the originals are either in the Daybook container or the Completed tasks container. At any point, I could set up another agent or alter the existing ones, and view my notes in a different way.

Tinderbox has great text and HTML export capabilities, so I can export my journal for the day, week, month or whatever period I want, and it’s easy to view in other forms or reformat for other uses. And if I ever want to use something else, the file itself is XML, so I could still get my data out.

I’ve been having issues with comments on this blog for a little while. I love seeing people discuss things I’ve posted about and I think it adds immeasurable to the content of the blog. However, I’ve had a problem with spam comments for a little while. An Akismet plugin handled things well for a time, but recently I’ve been getting spam that seems to be manually entered, and superficially looks like a legitimate comment, so Akismet doesn’t catch it. This got so annoying that I turned on moderation, which has the dual drawback of making commenting much less immediate for legitimate commenters, and making it more of a hassle for me, because I have to regularly sort through the comments in the moderation queue. There has to be a better way.

I’ve been looking at third-party commenting systems, and came across Disqus. It basically handles comments for you instead of the built-in commenting system of your blogging software. I’m using the generic Javascript version because there isn’t a plugin for ExpressionEngine, and this has a few downsides in terms of how easy it is to integrate with old posts, but it seems to work OK. On older posts, you’ll see the previous comments left with the built in system, then the comment box provided by Disqus, with any new comments in a separate list. A little clunky, but I guess it will do until I work out how to make the appearance a bit more integrated. On new posts, you should just see the Disqus system.

There are some advantages for commenters: while you don’t have to sign up with Disqus to post comments (you can just fill in a name and email address — which will not be shown — as before), if you do sign up at some point, you can ‘claim’ all your comments. You can see all the comments you’ve made on all Disqus enabled sites in one place on your Disqus profile, and people can rate your comments so you gain ‘clout’. This blog also gains a Community Page here, where you can see all the recent comments on the site, subscribe to comments feeds and so forth, all from one place. From the point of view of me as an adminstrator, I just have one easy location to view all comments and moderate them, which might make things a bit easier.

I’m going to play it by ear for a few posts and see how it goes. Do play with the comments and let me know what you think of the system. I’m trying to strike a balance between an easy and transparent experience for legitimate commenters and making it harder for the spammers.