ExpressionEngine 2.0

I've just upgraded to ExpressionEngine 2.0, a process which was not without it its glitches. I think I've got them sorted out now, though I seem to be having trouble with the feed still. Let me know if you notice that anything is broken. I've still got to sort out the Twitter Timeline in the sidebar, but apart from that, things should be OK.

Soap

Victorian Farm is back for a short run of Christmas specials, which I'm pretty happy about. The episodes are as interesting as ever (for example, I now know the origin of the phrase 'grinding to a halt'), but one thing really made me laugh. A few days before, I had caught a bit of Kirstie Allsopp's Homemade Christmas, where she was making soap. Soap making at home basically involves water, caustic soda and a fat, and caustic soda is pretty nasty stuff, as the name suggests. Consequently, they took great precautions when mixing the ingredients, wearing long rubber gloves and safety specs. The end result looked lovely: little dainty soaps scented with herbs and essential oils and decorated with rosebuds.

Soap making on the Victorian farm was a rather different matter. Ruth heated the water in her huge washing copper, adding a large chunk of rather old and manky looking fatty meat to provide the fat required: no airy fairy coconut oil there. She then added the caustic soda carefully, but without either rubber gloves or safety specs for the sake of authenticity — health and safety be damned! And was the end result a dainty rose-scented block? In a word, no. Rather than leaving the soap to cure and dry for 6 weeks to remove all traces of caustic soda, she scooped a bit out immediately and showed that it was ideal for scrubbing out chamber pots. Let no-one say that the average Victorian lived a glamourous life.

The Climber

Public transport in the UK has countless failings, but if you are looking for a silver lining to the big, grey cloud of its many inadequacies, it might be that they provide a reason to bond with your fellow travellers. Sometimes that bonding just involves rolling your eyes at your neighbour in a wordless "Buses, eh? What can you do...", but at other times, it turns into something a bit deeper. A distinct dearth of buses last Friday resulted in Mr. Bsag and I talking to a gentleman I'll call The Climber¹.

After the Chris Wood gig last week, we had a couple of transport choices. Moseley is in an awkward transport location relative to hour house, so we could either take a bus into the city then get the train out, or we could get a different bus to a main road and then catch a second bus. Arriving at the bus stop for the first option, we read the live bus departure ticker with a sinking heart: 20 minutes to the next bus. Never mind, we thought, there's always Plan B, and walked a short distance to the stop for the other bus. As we looked at the departure ticker there in disbelief, a tall, slim man sitting on a wall by the stop said, "I wouldn't look at that, if I were you. It will just depress you." He was right: the next bus was due in 25 minutes. Progressing reluctantly to Plan C, we told him we'd walk to the main road, a distance of about a mile. He then asked if we'd mind if he walked some of the way with us, since he was heading in our general direction, but wasn't sure of the route. We were quite happy to have company, and so, we made the acquaintance of The Climber.

He was an enthusiastic, bouncy sort of chap — like a half-grown puppy — and as he loped along beside us in the dark and drizzle, he started to tell us about his interests. It turned out that he had been climbing for four hours that evening, on an indoor climbing wall, working out by doing 50 pull-ups, 50 sit-ups and 100 press-ups. Clearly we were in the presence of some kind of Iron Man.

Now, Mr. Bsag always claims that he is shy, but he invariably chats happily away to perfect strangers, while I go all shy and just listen. So as we walked and Mr. B. and The Climber (TC) chatted, more and more details emerged of TC's energetic exploits. We heard about his epic peak-climbing weekends (also involving gargantuan bacon and egg consumption) and his competitive downhill biking (1 mile downhill in 1 minute, which means speeds greater than 60 mph, of course). As the walk progressed, and Mr. B. asked speculatively about other outdoor activities, stories about show jumping and even tall ship racing emerged. I was captivated, silently daring Mr. B to ask him if he'd crossed Antarctica, or raced Formula 1 cars, or gone into space.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not accusing TC of telling tall tales. He seemed very genuine and talked in great technical detail about everything he'd done, but it just seemed amazing to be walking in the rain to a bus stop with such an athlete. I remembered something that Chris Wood had said earlier in the evening (paraphrasing slightly): "All of my stories are true, but some are truer than others."

¹ I wouldn't use his real name even if I knew it, but we never actually found out what it was. ↑

Chris Wood gig

Last night, Mr. Bsag and I went to see Chris Wood play the All Services Club in Moseley. We had been looking forward to the gig for ages, as we are both big fans, but because of various other circumstances, we were exhausted after a very hard and busy week, and wondered if we were going to be in the right mood to appreciate it. We needn't have worried: it was fantastic, and the warmest, most intimate and spellbinding gig I've ever been to.

The All Services Club is a funny venue. The decor is a two or three decades out of date, and the main room contains a tiny stage of the kind that looks as if it is more used to hosting small children wearing tea-towels on their heads and pretending to be shepherds than world-renowned folk musicians. However, the tiny venue gave the event a very intimate feel. Since there is no stage entrance, Chris and the band had to wander through the audience to mount the stage. Near the end of the show, he was talking about encores, and how the accepted procedure is:

1. Band sing 'last song'
2. Audience applauds
3. Band goes off stage
4. Audience applauds
5. Band comes back on stage
6. Band plays encore

Given the stage, step 3 was impossible because there was nowhere to go (he put it a bit more strongly than that, to a lot of laughter), so they would just play two more numbers and end. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I adore Chris Wood's voice, and I love his style of guitar playing. When he sings, I hang on his every word like an utter fangirl. It helps that he is a consummate storyteller. Telling stories is a very old craft (and one of the original functions of folk songs, of course), but it's difficult to do well. He pulls you in to the story from the start, so that you can't wait to hear what happens next. There are emotional highs and lows, twists and turns and unexpected and beautiful turns of phrase that make you laugh or make tears come to your eyes, so that you have to pretend you've got a bit of dust in them.

On this tour (and on the new album, 'Handmade Life'), he was playing with a fantastic band comprising Robert Jarvis on trombone, Barney Morse Brown on cello and Andy Gangadeen on drums. They were terrific, and enhanced and complemented his sound, without overwhelming the words in any way. Robert also did an uncanny impression of a Merlin-engined Spitfire on the trombone (during the song 'Spitfires'), which made plane-mad Mr. Bsag¹ go a bit misty-eyed.

They played many of the songs off the new album (which we bought — and got signed! — at the gig), as well as a scattering of older favourites. Sometimes that can be disappointing if you haven't heard the new material yet: artists are understandably keen for you to hear what they have just been working on, but audiences like to hear what they already know and love. But in this case, it was wonderful. His songs are stories, and it was a priviledge to hear them for the first time live, rather than recorded². 'Hollow Point' was a great example of the thrill of hearing these things for the first time (though I'm sure that the experience will deepen with repeated listens). It starts off describing a beautiful summer day ("Awake, arise, you drowsy sleeper"), and sounds like a traditional folk song about pastoral pleasures with some sinister undertones. But then we find out that the person in question is getting on a bus. Gradually, it you realise that it's the story of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in 2005. It's a lament for him, and the feeling of doom, sorrow and inescapable fate is incredibly powerful.

I also loved 'Turtle Soup' — a song about Darwin's time on The Beagle. The tune is a great, sea-shanty-like thing, but the lyrics are very evocative too. There are a couple of lines at the end ("'Cause the church may shout but Darwin roars/At the age of twenty three") that made me covertly raise my fist in a Darwin Power salute (Biologists in da house! Reprazent!) and mutter an exultant "yes!" under my breath.

There were lighter moments too. Chris described 'My Darling's Downsized' as a love song for old gits, but that's fine by me. It's a lovely, warm song about the pleasures of cooking rock cakes and watching your potatoes chit on the allotment, and contained a lot of lines that made me laugh:

I light the touch paper but I don't retire
Because my love for her cannot be overstated
It's deep and it's not final salary related

As Chris said between numbers, folk singers have always sung because they felt that something need to be said. He upholds this tradition by championing the cause of people who are little-known, quiet, everyday heroes, from history to the present time — just don't get him started on David Starkey or Henry VIII. He also comments on the social and political situation, so there are quite a few tracks on the album about the credit crunch. He's certainly a man worth listening to, and I felt very lucky to be able to do just that yesterday.

¹Well, OK — me too. ↑

²Doubly so, because only those going to the gigs have access to the album until it is on general release when the tour ends. ↑

Becoming a Womble

Last weekend, someone fly-tipped in the car park of a pub that's near our house. The pub is closed at the moment, so the fly-tippers obviously thought the car park would make an ideal location for their illegal activity. It was broad daylight, but we watched in amazement as they roared up, opened the doors and shovelled the stuff out, then sped off again, wheels spinning.

When Mr. Bsag went over to see what they'd dumped, he found a huge load of mostly intact ceramic roof tiles, as well as a smaller number of slates. We immediately thought that the tiles would be very useful on the allotment to act as borders for our raised beds. At the moment, we just heap the soil up and don't have proper edging on the bed to hold it all in. The tiles overlap and interlock nicely, so we should be able to set the bottoms in the soil, then hold them upright with wooden pegs — ideal! We might even use the slates to floor a small porch that we're having put on our front door, if they turn out to be strong enough. It's not a big area, and there are enough intact tiles (if we clean them up a bit) to cover the whole floor.

So Mr. Bsag acted like a good Womble and barrowed most of the tipped material over to our house, ready to be re-used and recycled.

Men of the City

A busy month has meant that we've built up a backlog of recorded TV, so we've only just watched a Storyville documentary by Marc Isaacs, called Men of the City. I've always really enjoyed documentaries which sit back, observe and mostly let people speak for themselves, rather than asking questions, and Men of the City did just that. It's a real gem of a film.

Very simply, the film follows the lives of four men who work in the City of London: a hedge fund manager; a street sweeper; a man who holds a sign pointing to the nearest Subway sandwich shop; and a man who collects money on behalf of City clients. It's an incredibly beautiful, humane film. The photography is stunning (a downpour in London has never looked so beautiful), the music (by Michel Duvoisin) is lovely, but it's the portrait of the men which really holds your attention.

When you think of bankers and City money men and the recession, it's very easy to think "Bankers? Greedy, money-grabbing, selfish...blighters the lot of them." But of course, that's utterly untrue — every person is unique, and while it's easy to hate a faceless group of people, it's impossible to do so when you encounter people as individuals.

The hedge fund manager seemed to be looking at the world through a grey blanket of exhaustion, tinted with vivid washes of stress as his screens of figures changed from green to flashing red. His face showed a completely different kind of intensity as he printed out and mounted huge prints of his children (he had separated from their mother), smoothing the prints lovingly into an album. The money collector (I never did quite work out what his job involved) seemed to be a constant bundle of tension, and I feared for his poor heart. He wasn't rich, and yet his life had been one long round of worry about meeting the demands of his job and keeping a roof over his and his wife's head. The only time when I saw the stress ease from his face was when he was talking about motorbikes and the joy of just getting on the bike and going for a ride — then he looked free at last.

The Subway sign holder was an exhausted Bangladeshi man, holding the sign for minimum wage 10 hours a day on freezing streets, then working in a restaurant in the evening, and trying to look after his teenaged daughter alone in the time between. When she went into hospital and he had to visit her, he lost the sign holding job, and had to trail around restaurants, literally begging for a job. That was heart-breaking.

In many ways, the street sweeper seemed the most serene and happy, even though he wanted to get out of the city. He was an avid reader of New Age philosophies, trying to make sense of his life. But he had some startlingly poetic opinions about his job. Most people, he said, think of street sweepers as losers, but he saw it as serving his community. And if you can't make any job — even street sweeping — into a "graceful act", as he put it, then how can you act gracefully towards yourself or others? That really struck me. He's right, I think. It's not what you do, but how you do it that matters. It wasn't clear whether he actively chose his profession, or whether it was a last resort, but he seemed to me to be like a non-religious monk in some kind of gritty, open air monastery. He did his job as gracefully and mindfully as he could, and was aware and in touch with everything going on around him, in stark contrast to the others in the film, who seemed to have turned in on themselves, out of self-protection.

Most TV programmes and the newspapers deal in broad brush strokes and crude stereotypes, which is why it's so valuable to have programmes like this looking at individuals with a humane and non-judgmental eye.

Mac mini and EyeTV

Since we got rid of our VCR, several years ago now, we've been using EyeTV on our iMac to record TV and radio, streaming the resulting recordings to our living room TV using a discontinued Elgato product called EyeHome. This worked well for a long time, though if there happened to be significant wireless network activity while we were watching, we'd get a stuttering picture. The rest of the time it was great, as we don't watch much live TV, and we could also easily edit out the adverts and reduce the length of films scheduled in 2 hour slots by as much as 25 minutes.

This neat setup recently fell apart when our EyeHome developed a fault with the video card, and also started to randomly drop the audio while streaming some recordings. Since Elgato doesn't make the product anymore, I had to decide whether to get a streaming box from another manufacturer, or to try something else. I also wanted to take the opportunity to move all our music to a dedicated machine, and solve the network streaming problem. I thought it would also be good to be able to record TV on a box in the living room itself, as our iMac is in the office/spare room. Overnight guests Chez Bsag have often been surprised and delighted to be woken at 2am by the (very bright) iMac screen turning on when EyeTV starts to record some late night film on Channel 4. We tried to remember to clear the scheduled recordings when we had guests, but it didn't always work out like that.

The Mac mini was a fairly obvious choice and others, like Jon Hicks, have written in detail about setting the mini up as a media centre. I was tempted for a while by the AppleTV, but I'd still have to record TV using EyeTV then export the recordings to the AppleTV, which seemed like a bit of a pain. The other advantage of the mini is that I could run Squeezebox Server on it to pipe music to my venerable old SliMP3 player.

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A review of three things sharing a theme

I'm lagging behind a bit on reviewing some stuff I've come across recently, so I thought I might save a bit of time by doing a three part mini-review. When I was thinking about it, I realised that the film, book and album I'm about to review share a theme: death.

I expect I've lost all three of my readers now. But in these difficult times, a bit of morbid fascination cheers everyone up, right?

Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

The novel opens with the death of Queen Victoria, and follows two families — the Coleman and Waterhouse families — who happen to have adjacent family plots in a London cemetery. Sweeping social changes are about to replace the formality of the Victorian era (with its obsession with elaborate mourning rituals and rigid social class system), with something more informal and fluid in Edward's reign. The women's suffrage movement is slowly gaining momentum, to widespread disapproval from those who are still hanging on to the old, Victorian ways.

Each chapter relates events from the viewpoint of one of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Coleman and their daughter Maude, or Mr. and Mrs. Waterhouse and their daughter Lavinia. Occasionally, we get a very different view from the household servants, or from the boy who digs graves in the cemetery. The story (revolving around the cemetery) is pretty gripping, and the characters are brilliantly realised. In particular, the way that you see the two girls (Maude and Lavinia) maturing throughout the novel is fascinating.

Far North directed by Asif Kapadia

If you like the landscapes of the Arctic (it was filmed in Svalbard), you'll probably like this film. The photography is absolutely stunning, which is as well, because the plot is minimal and the dialogue almost non-existent. Given the minimal plot, it's difficult to describe without giving anything away, but I'll try not to post any spoilers. The story centres on Saiva (played by the terrific Michelle Yeoh) who has been told by a Shaman that she will bring death on disaster to any who get close to her. In an attempt to avoid this fate, she exiles herself, rescuing a baby called Anja along the way. One day they come upon a dying man, Loki, and everything starts to fall apart.

The film has a kind of harsh, mythic quality, enhanced by the fact that you can't place the time or geographical location of the action easily. I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I say that it doesn't have a happy ending, and death and relentless fate are omnipresent. At the time, it felt like quite a slight film, but it has lodged itself stubbornly in my mind, and I keep thinking about and reinterpreting events in the film.

Better Times Will Come by Diana Jones

I first heard a few tracks from this album in a concert of American Roots music shown on TV, and hosted by Seasick Steve. I found her mellow, unornamented voice and the way she sang about heartbreaking things with a total lack of sentimentality utterly mesmerising. And she tells a story so well. The songs on this album aren't (quite) all about death, but they are mostly sad songs about hard lives and difficult choices.

There are many good tracks, but in my opinion, 'Henry Russell's Last Words' is the best. Henry Russell was a Scottish miner who died in a mining accident in West Virginia in 1927. He and more than 100 others were trapped in the coal mine, and — without any hope of rescue — slowly suffocated and died. As the air was running out, Henry wrote a note to his wife Mary with a piece of coal. Jones used this letter as the basis for the lyrics.

The quiet acceptance, sorrow and dignity of Henry's words shines through the simple melody. Unless you are made of stone, the repeated refrain of "Oh how I love you, Mary" will bring tears to your eyes. Every single time you listen to it...

Suspended

We were in Bristol this weekend, for a wedding (the one I had to go clothes shopping for). The wedding celebration itself was great fun, so we had a lovely time on Saturday evening. However, because of travelling problems, we arrived later than we'd expected, and had to leave at lunchtime on the Sunday. This was a shame, because I was looking forward to wandering around one of my favourite cities. As we arrived, I was trying to remember how all the streets interlinked, and found that I didn't instantly recognise parts of the area I spent a year living in. Then I worked out that it is over 20 years since I was an undergraduate in Bristol. Gulp.

I slept really badly on Saturday night for a number of reasons, waking at 4.30 am and lying awake listening to the hotel's extractor fans rumble. I was particularly annoyed because the clocks had gone back an hour that night, so not only had I missed out on sleep, I'd missed out on the 'bonus' hour you get at the end of British Summer Time.

A morning walk in the bright, cold air of Clifton on Sunday morning cheered me up, though. Old Brunel built some pretty spectacular constructions, but I have an abiding and deep love for the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I never get tired of the elegant shape, or the way it responds to and emphasises the natural beauty and drama of the Avon Gorge. I love every gigantic nut and bolt of it. I've put a small selection of the photos I took in a set on Flickr (the whole collection would bore even the most ardent Brunel fan). I'm only sorry that we didn't get to see how it looks at night, now that they've replaced the old lighting with a new LED system. It does sound as if it would nicely accentuate the features of the bridge, while giving the impression that it is floating above the Gorge. However, I'm nostalgic about the warm, slightly random fairy light effect that the old tungsten bulb system used to have.

Ninja shopper

I'm off to a wedding next weekend, and I had nothing to wear. When I say 'nothing to wear' I don't mean in the sense that people often mean it ('I've got lots of suitable things, but I want something new', or 'I've worn that outfit more than once'), but literally, nothing suitable for a wedding. Unless you think that jeans, t-shirts, jumpers or one very light, very floral, summery dress are suitable for a winter wedding, I had nothing to wear.

So I was forced to try to buy some clothes. Regular readers will know how much I hate shopping for clothes (in fact, shopping for anything except computer gear, hifi equipment or records), so I had inevitably procrastinated until the last possible moment. Things were getting desperate. I decided that I'd do a bit of online reconnaissance first, so make the trip as brief and painless as possible. I looked through the websites of a couple of shops and identified some dresses that looked OK, then planned tactical visits to those shops: get in, locate dresses I'd found on the internet, try on, buy then get out like some kind of womenswear ninja.

Of course, things are never as simple in real life as they are on the internet. Once I was in the shop, there was so much stuff that I had real trouble finding and even recognising the things I'd picked out. Eventually — forcing myself to stick to the plan and not run home empty-handed — I found a few possibilities and trudged into the changing room with a heavy heart. One dress — despite allegedly being my size — wouldn't even go on without permanent damage to either the fabric or my body. Another fitted and was sort of OK but there were things I disliked profoundly about it, and the third made me look like I was wearing a knitted sack. I had to face the fact that I was going to have to go to another shop, and try on more things.

In the second shop, I found one of the dresses I'd seen on the 'net fairly quickly, which made me happy, but found that they only had a size smaller than the one I needed, which made me sad. Gritting my teeth, I decided that I should at least try it on, because the thought of having to go back to the first shop and buy the dress that was only sort of OK was too dreadful a prospect to entertain.

My first problem was how to actually get into the dress. With layers of lining and material, it appeared to be like an apple-pie bed, and I kept encountering dead ends, rather then finding my hand emerging through the neck hole. I got more and more frustrated, thinking, "This is ridiculous. I can write code fairly competently in a few languages, hook up computers and hifi gear without consulting manuals, and I even have a PhD for goodness sake: why can't I find my way into a dress and get my limbs in the correct apertures?"

Much tutting, mumbling and exasperated swearing later, I got the thing on, and after nearly dislocating a shoulder, fastened the zip at the back. Amazingly, despite apparently being a size too small, it fitted perfectly. And it actually looked quite good on me: as good as anything looks on me, since I'm more of a laundry basket than a clothes' horse. For the fashion fans among you¹ it's a kind of 50s shape of dress, with a boat neck, sleeveless, fitted over the torso and high-waisted, with an A-line skirt, in black². If you think of Audrey Hepburn, then substitute the adjective 'gamine' with 'Hobbit-y', you're along the right lines. Alternatively, take a JPEG image of Audrey (not in the 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' dress) and reduce only the vertical dimensions of the image, and that's the general impression.

I then had only to buy some shoes (another trial, but walking boots, trainers or Crocs don't cut it at a wedding), and I was free! With any luck, I won't need to go clothes shopping again for another 5 years or more.

¹ Though I have no idea why you're reading this blog, because there's precious little to interest you here. ↑

² Yes, apparently it is now acceptable to wear black to a wedding. I was amused to find, when searching on Google for an answer to this very question, that it's a very popular search phrase. White is still taboo (because you might be confused with the bride), but black is fine as long as you wear colourful accessories. And what else would you expect a ninja shopper to wear? ↑

A huge 8K of RAM

I've been so busy at work the past few weeks that all I've been fit for at the end of a long day is flopping in front of the TV. One programme that I really enjoyed (for the nostalgia factor as much as anything else), was Micro Men, a drama about the rather strained relationship between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they competed to produce the most popular home computer in the 1980s.

Some of the detail was fictional (as they stated at the start of the programme), but they did apparently consult with both men, so I guess that the end result was something that they could both agree on as being mostly true. I had no idea that Sinclair had such a temper, but various interviews I've seen with people who knew him at the time suggest that he did blow his top fairly spectacularly on occasion.

We had a Sinclair Spectrum at home ("the full 8 colours!"), and I vividly remember pecking out long, tedious programmes gleaned from magazines and manuals on its rubbery, imprecise keyboard. I also remember the woefully unreliable method of loading stored programmes from a portable cassette recorder. If ever a piece of technology encouraged the superstitious belief that you needed to do a special dance or sacrifice a chicken before it worked, the Sinclair Spectrum was it. Despite all that, we loved it, and my brother and I spent hours fiddling about with it and (inevitably) playing games with rudimentary graphics.

I also used Chris Curry's products during my PhD (which immediately makes me feel ancient). I wrote a programme on a BBC Micro to control a bit of apparatus, and used a later Acorn RiskPC to run a more sophisticated set up, using a little-known programming language called Arachnid.

One thing I'd forgotten was how incredibly diverse the British home computer ecosystem was at that time. It was a kind of early technological Cambrian Explosion, with a massive radiation of weird and wonderful forms of computers before the inevitable mass extinctions occurred. As with the space rocket industry, there was a time when the UK (briefly) led the world in computer literacy and usage, before it all went pear-shaped. A glorious — if frustrating — time when 8 colours seemed impossibly dazzling, and 8K of RAM was more memory than anyone could need.

QuicKeys

I've had a bit of an on-and-off relationship with QuicKeys, but it has certainly been a long one. When I have stopped using it for periods, it has usually been because I have adopted other ways for accomplishing the kinds of tasks it deals with, and it seemed like overkill to have a separate application running to deal with those things. However, with version 4, QuicKeys has become even more powerful, versatile and easy to use, and I am using it in earnest again.

For those of you who haven't encountered QuicKeys, it could be described as a macro utility for your whole system. You can create 'shortcuts' from a series of steps which automate actions that you would otherwise perform manually. There are a very wide range of possible actions in steps, from executing applescripts or shell scripts, to selecting from menus, manipulating windows, typing text or dozens of other things. You have quite a lot of control over the timing of these events and whether you need to wait for a particular window before moving on, which helps a lot in making the shortcuts reliable.

Once you have constructed your shortcut, you can trigger it in many different ways, from the obvious hotkey or mouse click to running if it is a certain date and/or time, if a certain volume has just mounted, or if an event occurs in another application. What makes this even more powerful is that all of the shortcuts can be limited to certain scopes (i.e. active applications). In practice, this means that you can reuse triggers in multiple applications without worrying that the wrong thing will happen. So you can — for example — launch a particular web page when you press F1 in Safari, and check for new email when you press F1 in Mail.

There are now also abbreviations (text replacements which happen automatically when you type a trigger) which replaces the need for TextExpander or similar utilities. In fact, the scopes make it very easy for me to type two dashes and a space and have them replaced with the HTML entity for an em dash in MarsEdit, and a unicode em dash in a rich text editor (which I've already done a couple of times in writing this article!).

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Parklife

As I cycled home from work through the park, I witnessed this scene:

Two magpies stood watching a hedgehog. The hedgehog was walking — slowly and very precisely — along the white line of a football pitch. The mapgies kept about half a metre from the hedgehog, but walked along behind it, watching it intently.

I'm sure that they were probably sizing it up to see if they could eat it, but I couldn't help thinking that — apart from the fact that they weren't wearing tiny, twee clothes — it looked like an updated and slightly sinister scene from a Beatrix Potter book.

Academic Spring

This coming week is Fresher's Week, so once again, the campus will be filling up with students. I always think that the start of the academic year is a kind of Academic Spring. Life seems to return to campus, with fresh-faced green shoots, eager to start their life at University, and there's lots of visible activity. Which isn't to say that nothing happens over the vacation: contrary to what undergraduates (and others) believe, academics don't get the summer vacation off. We usually work harder than ever to try to get some solid research done before we're swept away by the tide of teaching once the academic year starts. But that activity is rather hidden (like bulbs and roots developing under the soil) as we work hidden away in labs and offices.

It's the start of a very busy time for me. I've got more teaching to do than ever, but despite that, I'm looking forward to seeing those green shoots again, and diving back into public activity again. For me, Universities only really seem fully alive when they are populated by undergraduates.

That's my feeling now, anyway: ask me again in late November, and I'll probably be itching to get the mower out.

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!"

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