They call her the Ginger Ninja

One of the great things about having two cats is watching them play together. Bella and Bianca remind me a bit of Clouseau and Cato sometimes (Bianca is Kato), particularly when they are launching ambushes upon one another from inside a duvet cover that's hanging over our bannisters.

"Not now, Cato, you feul!"

Infinite monkeys

A couple of days ago, I went back to my office after leaving the computer for a short while, and heard the voice synthesiser reading out menus and other interface items. This — needless to say — was slightly freaky. The explanation was obvious, but still rather puzzling. You see, the cats have got into the bad habit of wandering over my keyboard recently. I've also found Bianca curled up peacefully on my MacBook's keyboard more than once. Considering that the laptop is on a raised shelf above the desk, you'd think this would be awkward, but apparently the toasty warmth of the processor and the shiatsu massage provided by the action of the keys is worth the trouble.

Evidently, in the course of either wandering across or lying on the keyboard, one of the cats had turned on a Mac OS X feature called VoiceOver: it is intended to assist people with visual disabilities by reading out the labels of whatever they are interacting with, text on screen and so on. The mystery part is that you turn it on with the Command-F5 keyboard combination: that's not easy to hit accidentally, even for a human with two hands. The F-keys are also quite small on both the external keyboard and the MacBook's own keyboard, so they aren't a big target.

My mind immediately conjured images of infinite numbers of monkeys sitting at typewriters. But forget the complete works of Shakespeare: if the cats ever randomly type 'FEED ME CAT FOOD NOW HUMAN', then trigger VoiceOver, I will be forever enslaved.

Alpine

A few weeks ago, I got an EeePC 1000HE netbook for work. I needed a dedicated, cheap machine to run some Linux-only stuff on, and I thought it would be nice to have a lightweight portable to take on trips. I'll write more about the EeePC later, but I wanted to mention my new-found love affair with the console email client, Alpine. I installed the ArchLinux distribution with the Awesome window manager, both of which are very lightweight and speedy, and I wanted an email client to match.

Over the years, I must have used a pretty large number of email clients. From Eudora, Mailsmith, a brief and regrettable affair with Microsoft Entourage (about which we will never speak again) to settling for a number of years on Apple's Mail, it actually all started with Alpine's predecessor: Pine. Back in those far-off days, I used Pine by connecting to the University's VAX machine, and I hated it. To be fair, it has come a long way since then, and I have learned to love the command line. After a few days of playing with Alpine on the EeePC, I decided that I wanted to switch to it on my Macs too.

{Read more...}

Ukulele Prom

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, or occasionally look at the tweets in the sidebar of this site will have noticed me going on about the Prom featuring the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (UOGB). The prom actually happened on Tuesday night, but we recorded it and listened to it last night. I've made no secret of my love for UOGB, and their performance at the Prom didn't disappoint. Any group of people who can turn Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' into a ratpack swing classic, make 'Anarchy in the UK' sound rather sweet and wistful, or sing 'Pinball Wizard' from Tommy a capella and make it sound like a sea shanty, have my undying admiration. The latter piece also got the funniest, most affectionate heckle of the night from the audience. They announced that they would be singing (without their instruments) one of the greatest English Rock songs of all time, and someone yelled out "Judas!". OK, so it's only funny if you know your Dylan folklore, but then it's hilarious, and it was delivered with perfect timing.

The piece de resistance was when they played Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' with approximately 1,000 ukulele-wielding audience members playing along. It could have sounded dreadful, but actually, it was brilliant, uplifting and rather joyous. It's great to hear professional musicians doing what they do best, but even better is when they let you join in. When so many people participate, you don't have to feel self conscious about making a mistake (really — who is going to notice if one person in 1,000 plays a dud note?) and you can just enjoy the feeling of being part of something wonderful. I get the same feeling every time I take part in the CBSO singalong. I'm only a very poor amateur, but it's wonderful to join the professionals, concentrate hard, and mix my voice with so many others. I would have loved to have been at that Prom, and might have even bought a ukulele and learned to play the piece specially for the occasion!

Memo to Bianca

Dear Bianca (Cat¹),

It's really sweet that you always want to accompany me to the bathroom if I get up at night. After all, I could get lonely in there, and a friendly, wide-awake cat is always a pleasant companion. And it's lovely when you rub around my bare legs — you have very soft fur, and it's nicely soothing.

However, we have to talk about the toe licking. I know that you're just being affectionate (or perhaps my toes taste of tuna?), but it's downright unnerving. You see, I try to maintain a state of being just conscious enough if I have to get up at night. But you have an phenomenally scratchy tongue and it tickles like nobody's business, particularly when you try to lick between my toes. That tends to rocket me into full consciousness pretty quickly, which — you'll realize if you've been following along — is a Bad Thing.

So the Executive Summary is as follows: leg rubbing = good; toe licking = bad.

Thank you for your attention (between bouts of pouncing on bits of fluff you've pulled out the carpet and trying to eat paper tissues).

Your pal and cat biscuit provider,

bsag

¹ I think this qualification is necessary for people who don't know she's a cat. Otherwise, there could be... misunderstandings. ↑

Rested

We got back yesterday from a week's holiday split between Surrey and Sussex. Our original holiday plans went somewhat awry for various unavoidable reasons, so we had to book something at the last minute, and ended up splitting our week between staying with my parents in Surrey for a few days, and staying in a B&B in Lewes, Sussex. Despite the fact that it was a last minute thing (or perhaps because of that) it was a wonderful break, and I finally feel properly rested. I didn't check email and barely scanned Twitter, RSS feeds and so on. I really enjoyed my online fast as I remembered how much fun the real world can be.

Having grown up in Surrey, I'm often quite scathing about it, but it actually has some very nice parts when you view it through adult, tourist eyes rather than those of a stroppy teenager. We had a lovely walk in the countryside, went to Brighton for the day and visited National Trust properties, courtesy of one of the best wedding presents ever from my much-loved and much-missed godmother: a lifetime membership to the National Trust.

Then, in the second leg of the holiday, we went down to Lewes in Sussex. It's a lovely town with some great buildings, a castle, and lots of independent shops. It also has a reputation for feisty, radical, rebellious residents, which is appropriate as Lewes was the birthplace of one of the fathers of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine. Lewes people tend to stand up for what they believe in, and are fiercely independent. For example, when the brewery Greene King took over the Lewes Arms and decided to stop serving the locally-brewed Harveys ales, the townspeople boycotted the pub. This lead to such a drop in sales (and some terrible publicity) that Greene King were forced to reverse their decision. The pub (in which we spent some very happy hours) is now run by Fullers, and is a lovely, quiet place (mobile phones are banned and there is no recorded music or fruit machines) — serving Harveys, of course.

I think that Lewes people are rather wonderful. Within an hour of arriving in the town, we were given a little guided tour by a resident, who started chatting to us in the Tourist Information shop. She said she was walking our way anyway, and pointed out the sights to us along with some local history. Everyone we met was friendly and justly proud of their lovely town. Three days in Lewes wasn't really enough, so we'll be back there, I'm sure. In the meantime, we really enjoyed the fresh air, the friendly people, and eavesdropping on intelligent, interesting conversations in the pub. Despite all that, it's nice to be home and have the cats back. They went into a cattery for the first time, and while they were fine, they are certainly enjoying being back home. I've never seen two such contented cats as Bella and Bianca last night, as they snuggled up with us on the bed for the night. I've also got another week of leave, so I'm looking forward to a bit more unwinding in the hope of being substantially more refreshed when I return to work. I haven't got around to downloading my photos off the camera yet, but some pictures of Sussex and Surrey will follow at some point.

Cat occupations

Cats are strange creatures. Many seem to find themselves odd modes of unpaid — but deadly serious — employment. Maru inspects boxes with great thoroughness and Tom Cox's cat Janet (a he, not a she, by the way) collects retro plastic wrappers from a nearby lake for a living. One of our cats has also revealed her occupation recently.

When we got our cats, the previous owner told us that Bella liked to drink from the tap. This took some time to manifest itself, but after a few weeks, she would hop up onto the cistern in the bathroom and position herself near the tap, waiting for us to turn it on. You have to select just the right flow rate though, or she looks at you with that classic disappointed feline gaze which implies, "Oh, you just can't get the staff nowadays."

A short while after Bella started drinking from our taps, Bianca started her very important job: Advanced Basin Surveillance. If you have closed the bathroom door to get a bit of privacy, then open it, Bianca will come rushing in, and leap immediately on to the cistern. If she had access to a blue flashing light, I'm sure she would use it, because she shows Emergency Services levels of urgency. She then crouches down and watches the basin from close range with an intensity and focus that would shame many humans. She does this for very long periods, only changing position when a drop of water in the basin makes a break for the plughole, and then she's right on the case. It's hilarious to watch.

Between the two cats, it's actually quite hard to have the bathroom to yourself, and I've frequently found myself sharing a very small bathroom with two cats perched on the cistern or trying to walk around the edge of the basin.

Holland

I'd never been to Holland before, but I'm sure I'll go again after a week there for a conference and other work business. The people are very friendly and generally laid-back, the towns are pretty and there seem to be quite a lot of nice open spaces, parks and woodlands. But the best two things about Holland are the trains and the cycling environment.

We travelled on the train a few times, and apart from one journey where the carriages were over-full and we had to stand, the service was wonderful. You can easily buy tickets from the machines, the information at the stations is very clear, and — most importantly — the trains are punctual. We had the novel experience when making a connection of finding that our train was not only timed to meet the connecting service, but that the trains were on adjacent platforms. The pricing structure is also admirably simple, with only a couple of types of tickets, rather than the incomprehensible mess of Super-Advance-Third-Wednesday-in-Lent-Only tickets we have here.

And the bikes! Of course, I knew that the Netherlands was a cycling Utopia, but actually experiencing it is something else. Unfortunately, the schedule (and our finances) didn't allow for hiring bikes, but I was gazing adoringly at the lovely, upright, laid back machines gliding by. What I love about Dutch cycling is that it is taken as something absolutely normal and unremarkable. Cyclists there would think that you were a bit weird if you wore special clothes or — heavens! — a helmet, unless you were an actual, in-training racing cyclist.

Everyone, from little kids to elderly people, cycles. There are dedicated cycle paths on either side of almost every road, and everyone else has to give way to the bikes. The bikes themselves are very comfortable with full mudguards, lights and racks as standard equipment, and encourage a stately, gentle progress so that you don't work up a sweat. When it rained, cyclists unfurled umbrellas rather than donning waterproofs, and I saw couples holding hands as they cycled side-by-side. Parents also held the hands of their younger children as they crossed junctions together on their bikes, which struck me as very sensible and rather sweet. People sit upright, looking around them and beaming at passers-by. Wonderful.

Of course, the flat terrain helps a lot: it's much more difficult to look nonchalant and carefree while puffing up a 1:4 gradient, but the culture is completely different. The next time I visit, I'm definitely going to hire a bike next time I visit, and try to hold on to that carefree spirit when I'm dodging cars, dogs and broken glass on my daily commute.

Off for a week

I'm sorry for the silence around here recently: things have been hectic to say the least. I'm just about to fly to the Netherlands for a conference and other work business for a week, so things are likely to remain quiet for a bit longer.

I may get a chance to post something if I get some wireless access, but time will probably be more limiting. Once I've got over the hassle of travelling, I'm quite looking forward the trip, as I've never been to Holland before. I'm particularly excited about the fact that I might get to ride a real Dutch bike on real Dutch bike paths!

The wheels nearly came off

Something weird and slightly creepy happened this week.

It all started in an innocuous, if slightly annoying, way. Riding my bike home from work, I found that the back wheel was incredibly stiff. There was a lot of friction, even when freewheeling, and various clunks and creaks were coming from the hub. I checked (so I thought) for any obvious problems, but I couldn't see what might be causing it. I was forced to conclude that my Shimano Nexus 8-speed hub gear was having problems, and needed servicing and perhaps some new parts.

It was difficult to find a cycle shop which had the necessary know-how and tools to service Nexus hub gears, and the nearest I could find would mean transporting my bike by car (particularly as it was difficult to ride with the gear problems). I didn't have time to take it in the week, but on Saturday, Mr. Bsag and I struggled to get the bike in the car. With a very small car and a rather chunky bike, this was never going to be an easy fit, and even after we'd taken the front wheel off, we still couldn't get the hatchback closed. So Mr. Bsag went to take the back wheel off as well, and found something odd: the nuts holding the rear axle to the frame were barely even hand-tight — in fact, they were positively loose. Curious. Even more curious was the fact that the headset nut was also extremely loose, resulting in a lot of play in the front forks. Obviously, I should have checked that everything was properly tightened when I had problems, but it didn't occur to me, as I check my bike fairly regularly for those kinds of things. We tightened everything up properly, and — lo and behold — the bike was back to normal, smooth operation again. That solved the problem of fitting the bike in the car, and the expense of getting it fixed, but left unresolved how it got in that state in the first place.

Now, it's possible that they worked themselves loose, but we'd fixed a puncture only a few weeks ago, and we know that the wheel nuts were fully tightened up then. The problem also came on very suddenly, in the interval between riding my bike to work, leaving it in the bike shed and riding it home. I'm wondering if some mischievous or malevolent person with a spanner has been loosening nuts. They couldn't have got my rear wheel off anyway, because the bike has one of those Continental frame locks which locks the rear wheel to the frame. Whatever the cause, I'll be checking my nuts more regularly from now on. So to speak...

When governments go wrong

In the space of a couple of weeks I found myself watching three dramas (one a drama-documentary) which had striking parallels I hadn't anticipated. It was pure chance that I saw all three so close together in time, but the effect was a bit creepy.

The first was the Torchwood mini-series, Children of Earth. An excellent series (though full of over-the-top sci-fi stuff, as you might expect), Children of Earth explored some quite serious themes concerning ethics and morality. I don't want to give away any spoilers if you haven't seen it, but it asked the question, would you trust the government to make a difficult ethical decision? The answer was a resounding "No way!" because the Government is made up of imperfect people who have their own needs and those of their families at heart, rather than those of the country.

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution was a drama-documentary about the aftermath of the French Revolution, and included some interesting details I hadn't known about before. Of course, the French Revolution started with a very noble, humanist idea (liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that), but somehow it ended up with what amounted to people being convicted of 'Thought Crimes'. Any dissent was punishable by death, and even showing fear or anxiety while being tried was taken as evidence of guilt. As Simon Schama put it, with an out-of-control dictatorship in charge, who could convict you of a totally trumped-up crime, any sane person would be mortally afraid.

Finally, we saw V for Vendetta, a film I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. It is set in Britain in the near future, where an apparent terrorist threat has allowed a dictatorship to take over the country and destroy civil liberties in the name of protecting the people¹. They do nothing of the sort, of course, and institute a repressive, totalitarian regime that Robespierre would recognise. It's also a cracking action-thriller, but the political and ethical issues lifted it above the level of similar films.

The message that I took away from all these films is the danger inherent in governing bodies thinking that they can make decisions for the populace, and force people to think in certain ways. You may start out with good and benign intentions (like Robespierre), but it always ends in tears and executions.

¹ Sound familiar? ↑

Twitter to Disqus

Here's something I meant to mention a while ago: I've set up my Disqus account (which provides the commenting service here) to allow people to sign in using Twitter. So now — if you have a Twitter account — you don't have to have sign up with Disqus or comment as a guest. Instead, you can use your Twitter credentials (via OAuth) to sign in, and as a bonus, you can Tweet your comment automatically.

Give it a try!

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Last weekend, we made a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park — a wonderful, enormous, outdoor art gallery near Wakefield. I'd never been before, but it won't be the last time I visit, because there was so much to see. Even if you're not into art and sculpture, there are some lovely walks through the parkland and woodlands, and it would be worth visiting just for that. It's worth mentioning that entry is free, and you only need to pay for parking (currently £4 per car), or arrive by bus.

It's hard to know where to start, because I enjoyed so many of the art works. I've loved Andy Goldsworthy's pieces for a long time so I enjoyed his Hanging Trees and Outclosure. The Hanging Trees are dry stone wall boxes set into a length of wall, containing a horizontally suspended tree, which you look down on as if on a corpse in a coffin. Outclosure is a perfectly circular, tall dry stone wall, set in a woodland clearing. It is too tall to see over (unless you are very tall), and the tight perfection of the stone work makes you feel as if you are being kept out of something you'd really like to get into.

I also loved James Turrell's Deer Shelter. As the name suggests, this is built out of an old deer shelter in the parkland, and takes the form of a kind of bunker, built into the earth. You enter it through one of two dark tunnels, which feels a bit like entering a Neolithic barrow might. You come out into a square, white room with a perfectly square opening in the roof, through which you can see only sky. Around the edge of the room, there are cool, concrete benches, with sloping back rests that encourage you to lean back and look up at the square of sky. I can't explain exactly why, but I found it magical. It is quiet in the room, though it echoes like a cathedral, and you can hear distant sounds from the outside and feel the breeze. Framing a section of the sky seems to really mess with your depth perception. The first time we went in, there was low, uniformly grey sky, and it was as if the sky was simultaneously flat and sitting right above our heads and also thousands of miles above us. Every now and again, you would catch a glimpse of a swift rocketing across the sky and that would give it sudden and shocking scale. Later, after it had brightened up and we were hot and tired from a long walk, we went in again, and the coolness, breeze and tranquility of watching the clouds drift across the blue square of sky was delicious and mesmerising. I could honestly have stayed there all day, and just enjoyed the changing light. I'd love to be in there when it rains. The benches are under the covered part of the roof, so you could look up into a square column of falling rain drops, while remaining mostly dry.

Rather late in the day, we found the indoor, underground gallery, which was showing a lot of pieces by Peter Randall Page. I don't think I've ever seen his work before, but I loved it. Photography wasn't allowed in the gallery, so you'll have to see the website for pictures of the indoor works, but the pieces were mostly huge, beautifully carved blocks of granite or limestone. They have very organic shapes, and look like seeds or cells blown up to gigantic proportions. Unfortunately, you weren't allowed to touch, which was a great shame, because they made you want to stroke them to feel the texture or trace the engraved lines. I'm not usually a fan of abstract works, but I really liked all of his pieces. He also had some wall mounted pieces, which were made from shapes of dried clay, split and opened out into mirror symmetrical patterns which formed an overall egg shape or pair of wings. They reminded me of ink blots or tissue slices mounted on a glass slide, or perhaps slices of an MRI scan. I think that the patterns — regular, but with organic imperfections and irregularities — were what I liked so much about them, and it's also what I like about a lot of Andy Goldsworthy's work.

It was a great day out, and you can see some of my photos on Wings Open Wide (with a new look!) or in my Flickr set.

New photoblog

I've been irritated for a while by the setup I had for my photoblog, Wings Open Wide. It looked nice enough, but I had to upload my photos manually, title them, describe them and set the location and so on. That was annoying when I was also uploading to Flickr, and thus duplicating effort, so I started to post fewer photos to my photoblog. I could have just swtiched to Flickr and directed people over there, but it feels a bit impersonal. Flickr is great for the social aspects, but it doesn't feel like my space. I also upload more stuff to Flickr than I want to display as my photographic portfolio.

I considered a variety of different approaches, which varied in complexity and functionality, before stumbling on Flogr. It's a fairly simple but rich PHP photoblog, which pulls your Flickr photos into a gallery that you can style to your liking. By default, it gets all of your photostream, but you can also restrict it to certain tags or photosets. I've set it up to pull in photos with the tag 'photoblog' which makes it easy for me to be selective. Optionally, you can cache the photos and information in a MySQL database, speeding up display somewhat. If you click the 'Details and Comments' link, you can see — well — details and comments, and you can click the comment link to go to Flickr to leave a comment. There's also a nice Lightbox view for the recent photos, allowing you to navigate between them, or view them full size by clicking the title at the bottom left.

I like it a lot, so I've set it up here. I didn't want to break any existing links, so I've left a link to the archived Wings Open Wide on the new page. I might do a bit more restyling of the page, but I'm pretty happy with it as it is. One thing I haven't quite sorted out yet is the display of thumbnails on this blog. I've used the Flickr badge, so it shows the right images, but links directly to Flickr rather than Wings Open Wide. That's not a big issue, but I might see if I can fix it at some point.

Fanny

A few weeks ago, I caught the very end of a re-run of The Old Grey Whistle Test, and a brilliant band from the 1970s. They were an all-female band and had a terrific style, with vocals slightly reminiscent of Janis Joplin. I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of them before because they were so good. I waited for the credits at the end of the programme and found out that the band was called Fanny. I know — it's an unfortunate name, but don't let that put you off. I've done a bit more research on them and — to my delight — found that a retrospective collection of four of their albums (with lots of extra material) is available on Spotify in the form of First Time in a Long Time: The Reprise Recordings.

If you like rock bands, you should definitely go and listen, but here's what I like about them. First (and most importantly), they are great musicians. There is some wonderful guitar work (both lead and bass), brilliantly funky keyboards, and some incredibly crisp drumming. I don't even usually notice percussion to any great extent, but I found myself listening to how sharp and precise the drumming was, and yet it still felt lively and organic. Second, the band members also seem to share the song-writing credits and they all (at one point or another) take lead vocals, which makes for some quite diverse tracks. Some of their songs are quiet and folk-influenced, some are hard, driving rock, and some really funky. They also do some really good covers, including a wonderful cover of Cream's 'Badge'. It takes a lot of confidence and skill to take on a classic from such respected musicians, but they pull it off with considerable aplomb, and bring a new feeling to it. Judging from their performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, they were also electric live, and didn't exploit their unusual status as an all-female band at all, but just relied on being great musicians, regardless of gender.

I also love 'I Just Realised', 'It Takes a Lot of Good Lovin'' and 'Seven Roads', but there's a lot to choose from. You can buy the collection on iTunes, but the next time I go to our local vinyl shop, I'll be rummaging through the 'F' section seeing if I can find any of their albums on vinyl, because that would be a real treat.

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