but she's a girl...
[Femina geekoides]

Changes afoot

I’m about to make some pretty major changes around here, so don’t be alarmed if things are a little weird (or completely broken) on the site for the next couple of days. It will all get sorted out eventually, and I’ll try to keep the disruption to a minimum.

With any luck, you’ll like the result, and with even more luck it will work. Keep your fingers crossed…

Words, glorious words

Through Green Fairy, I’ve just discovered Wordsmith’s wonderful Word-a-Day site. She mentioned a couple of brilliant words that I hadn’t heard of before. I’m now going to have to find excuses to slip them into casual conversation:

Strikhedonia - The pleasure of being able to say ‘to hell with it’

Sphallolalia - Flirtatious talk that leads nowhere

Sphallolalia—it even sounds seductive.

I love words, and one of my favourite books is a dictionary of words for which no words exist: the excellent Deeper Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. All of Douglas Adams’ books make me roar out loud with laughter, but this one is useful and funny. For example, haven’t you always wanted a word for ‘an agonizing situation in which there is only one possible decision but you still can’t take it’ (Abalemma, n.)? It’s one of those books that makes you constantly read bits out to anyone else who happens to be in the room (there ought to be a word for that but there isn’t), so I could quote sections ad nauseam, but I’ll try to restrict myself to just a few favourites:

Cue evil laugh...

I found this great (and funny) phrasing of a moral dilemma today (via jb’s blog). After I’d read it (and laughed my head off), I remembered that I’d seen something similar ages ago, but I still got suckered in.

Un-British weather

I’m going to do something very British here, and talk about the weather. But the reason I’m doing so is because of the very un-British weather we’ve been having today—with me so far?

The weather in Britain is generally defined by its moderation. It doesn’t get very hot, it doesn’t get very cold, and it often drizzles half-heartedly for days on end rather than having a jolly good downpour and getting it all over with. I don’t know what has been going on for the past two days, but it seems as if the British weather has been trying on some tropical weather systems for size, just for kicks. I was off-sick today, and feeling very wan after only two hours of sleep last night (I’ll spare you the details), so I watched the sudden changes in the weather with the words what the hell is going on forming on my lips.

First, it was very bright and sunny, with barely a breath of wind. Then—without so much as a by-your-leave—a huge wind blew up, a ground-shaking clap of thunder made me jump out of my chair, and hailstones the size of beans pummelled the earth for few minutes. Then everything abruptly stopped, the sun came out, and the wind completely stopped. This pattern cycled two or three times during the day. It’s just not on.

Suckered

Several weeks ago, the Plecostomus fish in our tank at work died (it seems to be a difficult time for fish), and the tank has been getting progressively more obscured by algae growing on the glass. Plecostomuses (or perhaps Plecostomi?) feed on algae by scraping it off with their sucker-like mouths, and are ruthlessly efficient at keeping the tank clean. David has a nice picture of his pleco, George, doing just that here.

When I came in this morning, I was surprised to see a huge (well, 15 cm long) new pleco in the tank, busily suckering its way around the glass. It’s a mesmerising sight from the other side, watching the mouthparts working away at a frantic pace. I once had to catch our former pleco when we had to drain the tank temporarily. I don’t recommend it as an experience; it suckered itself on to my palm and started rasping away, making me go “Yeurghh!”. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it was a mildly unpleasant surprise.

Now we have to think of a name for New Pleco.

War photography

I’ve just watched a wonderful short documentary about the photographer Simon Norfolk. He’s a war photographer now, but not in the usual photojournalist sense. He goes into war zones after the battle is over and takes stunningly beautiful—but also very humane—photographs of the effect of war on the landscape with a large format landscape camera. He consciously uses the language of Classical landscape painting: a beautiful landscape in the background, glowing light on the horizon, a ruined building, and an innocent shepherd boy in the foreground. The colours are rich, and he brings out all the detail and texture of these ravaged landscapes.

The photographs are shocking, but not because they are gory or graphic; they show the full devastion that war leaves in its wake, in all its beautiful, horrifying detail. I’m always fascinated by the way artists talk about and approach their work. In the film he visited a site in Bosnia where mass graves containing over 600 bodies had been found. Mounds and pits were formed by the excavation, and the water in the hollows had frozen over. Simon decided not to take the landscape—which would have been just documenting the site in a rather cold way—but focused on the air bubbles trapped in the ice. They made him think that people might still be trapped underneath, imprisoned, waiting to be revealed like the truth when the ice melted in the spring. The results were abstract and delicately beautiful, but when you know about the location, they are completely disturbing.

He also had a magnificent rant about the sterility and banality of modern art. Unfortunately, I didn’t get an exact quote down, but he was saying that making a head out of your own blood isn’t controversial or shocking, but the fact that human bones and body parts are uncovered when the villagers clear some land to make a football pitch is shocking.

April Fool's Day

I’ve had two shocks today:

1. I had a nasty moment when I thought that Brian Eno’s prodigious talent might have completely evaporated overnight—just like that.
2. When I checked my email on Mailsmith this morning, I heard a loud buzzing alongside the normal notification sound. I thought that one of the drivers must have come adrift in the speakers, but I eventually checked my notification preferences. If you use Mailsmith, take a look at the notification preferences today (I’m not giving anything away…). Any company that takes the trouble to build an April Fool’s joke into their software (well ahead of time) is alright by me.

The Genius of PG Wodehouse

Nobody writes like PG Wodehouse. I’m reading Piccadilly Jim at the moment (on my Treo—very convenient for those moments when you find yourself without a book), and this absolute gem made me laugh out loud. The eponymous man-about-town is recovering on the sofa after a night of rather ill-advised high jinks, and talking to his butler, Bayliss:

“You know, Bayliss,” said Jimmy thoughtfully, rolling over on the couch, “life is peculiar, not to say odd. You never know what is waiting for you around the corner. You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon. Why is this, Bayliss?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

I have absolutely no idea what “ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon” might mean, but it’s a phrase to roll around your mouth like fine wine, and to employ when the occasion demands.

An announcement

This is an embarrassing post to write, because if there’s one thing I find awkward, it’s blowing my own trumpet. However, I’m in need of work contacts, so I’ll prepare my embouchure…

About a month ago, in response to my rather anguished plea for career suggestions, several people suggested technical authoring. I thought it was a pretty good idea, so I did a bit of research. It was clear that having some kind of portfolio (in addition to this weblog) would help me a lot, so I decided to see if I could persuade a shareware developer to let me write a manual for free, in return for using the result as a portfolio piece.

As luck would have it, that very day I stumbled on a fantastic piece of software, which didn’t yet have any documentation—Quicksilver. The developer, Nicholas, accepted my offer, so I’ve been hard at work writing the thing for a few weeks. Quicksilver is proving to be very popular, and the clamor for documentation became so loud that we decided to release the manual in its somewhat unfinished form, alongside the new Beta version of the software. The past few days have therefore been very hectic, but fun.

So, I present the Quicksilver Manual: written by yours truly, edited by Nicholas. It’s not perfect, and it’s not finished, so be gentle with me. I’d love some constructive criticism, though—if anyone can be bothered to read it. And if by some slim chance you happen to be a developer looking to hire a technical author, then do get in touch.

Nicholas came up with a really cool job title for me: Lead Documentrix. I love it—apt, funny and ever-so-slightly saucy. I’m thinking of getting a T-shirt made. So, if you’re contacting me about technical authoring, the address to use is: documentrix [at] rousette [dot] org [dot] uk.

Oh, and it’s my birthday today (thanks to David for the very observant birthday wishes)…

Spring forward...

…or in my case, shuffle forward. I hate the day that the clocks go forwards—I feel cheated out of an hour of sleep, even if I go to bed an hour early the night before, and I feel out of sorts all day. It didn’t help that I had a project to finish (for some value of ‘finish’) and consequently had a lot to get done today.

I much prefer Autumn, with the clocks going backwards. Still, you can’t do that at both ends of the year—it just wouldn’t work, would it? I’m too tired to think about it.