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06 Jan 2009
One of the many things which I love and admire about Mr. Bsag is his almost magical ability to pick great books and music for me. The extraordinary thing is that I have often never heard of the item in question, and if I had, would never have thought of choosing it. But when I listen to the music or read the book, I think it is wonderful and love it to bits. Even though he knows me pretty well, it baffles me how he decides that I would like a particular item, because they often don't fit obviously with my interests or taste. An excellent example is the book, Pilgrimage on a Steel Ride: A Memoir of Men and Motorcycles by Gary Paulsen, which he gave me a few years ago. It is a non-fiction book about Paulsen's journey from New Mexico to Alaska on a Harley-Davidson motorbike at the age of 57. For one thing, I very rarely read non-fiction books (other than those relevant to my work), and although I quite like motorbikes (particularly Harleys), it's not an obsession. And yet, I loved the book, and its perfect explanation of what it is to be a man. I've re-read it several times, and it remains one of my favourite books: a perfect choice.
Which brings me to 'Flower of Evil': I'd never heard of the artist or the album before, but put it on and was ravished by it. When I ripped it to iTunes to put it on my iPhone, the Gracenote database set the Genre as 'Unclassifiable', which sounds about right to me. The album is mostly composed of extreme cover versions, so different from the originals, that it's often quite difficult to identify the song. Her strong, clear voice reminds me a bit of P. J. Harvey's, and that combined with the great arrangements and stately pacing of the songs gives everything a haunting, almost sinister air.
The ABBA song, 'Lay All Your Love On Me' becomes a pleading, entreaty, and while I never thought I could like Without You, she turns it from overblown bombast to genuinely affecting emotion. The only relatively 'straight' cover is her version of Sandy Denny's 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes', which is beautiful and worthy -- but respectful -- of Sandy's original.
It's well worth a listen, though I suspect that it's something you'd either love or hate, which makes it all the more miraculous that Mr. Bsag made such a good choice.
06 Jan 2009
Ada Lovelace Day — Bringing women in technology to the fore
"If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.
Thus was born Ada Lovelace Day"...
I've pledged to write an article. Now I just have to decide who to write about!
(tags: technology women)
05 Jan 2009
Today was my first day back at work after the holiday, and I wasn’t looking forward to it with any great enthusiasm. As I got up, the news on the radio was full of doom and gloom (death and destruction in Gaza, economic collapse etc.) and reported that today is supposedly one of the most depressing days of the year. It was also snowing and icy, which meant that I had to get the train to work—another prospect that I didn’t relish given the propensity of our rail network to seize up at the first hint on inclement weather.
As I walked to the station, I put on my headphones and set the iPhone to shuffle to try to cheer myself up with a bit of music.
iPhone: Chris Thomas King: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues…
Me: Et tu, iPhone?
They’ve all got it in for me, I tell you…
03 Jan 2009
I've really enjoyed this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lecture series -- 'Hi-tech Trek: The Quest for the Ultimate Computer', given by Prof. Chris Bishop. For readers outside the UK, this is an annual lecture series on some aspect of science, primarily intended for children. I've watched some of the lectures in other years, and they are sometimes a bit patchy. However, I thought that Chris Bishop did a fantastic job of explaining quite difficult concepts, accompanied by the requisite number of explosions, feats of dare-devilry and maths problems disguised as magic tricks, and yet he avoided the trap of patronising the audience.
As a lecturer myself (though at nothing like such an exalted level), I find it interesting watching other people give lectures, and I often hope to pick up some tips and tricks. The basis of every good lecture -- regardless of subject or the academic level of the audience -- is telling a compelling story. A true story of course, but if you don't engage the audience, you might as well be talking to yourself. I often think that what you're trying to do is to gently guide your audience so that they just about get to each point just before you do. If -- as an audience member -- you're not trying to answer the questions posed by the lecturer before they tell you what the answer is, they've lost you.
I think that this lecture series succeeded so well because Chris Bishop told a great story, and there was something for everything. Mr. Bsag has less knowledge of Computer Science than me (and less interest in it), but we both learned some new and interesting things. For example, I was astonished that the chip in a chip-and-PIN credit card has roughly 30 times the processing power and 100 times the memory of the landing guidance computer on board the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. What I find surprising is not how powerful chip-and-PIN chips are, but that they actually managed to land the module on the moon with such meagre computing resources. I know that it's a factoid, but it does bring home to you just how quickly computing power has increased.
I do wish that my undergraduates were as keen to participate, though: a great forest of arms went up each time he asked for a volunteer, and the helpers looked really chuffed with their role of pouring small yellow balls into a tank, or standing in front of a 3D camera. In one of the lectures, each audience member had a gift-wrapped pair of transparent polarising films. Bishop demonstrated how the light was alternately blocked and transmitted by the films as they were overlaid and one rotated 90#176; relative to the other. Judging by the gasps of delighted astonishment coming from the kids (and the fact that you could see them still playing with the films for the rest of the lecture), I think that their parents had probably wasted their money on Playstations and Wiis for Christmas.
01 Jan 2009
I've been meaning to update the style of the site (again) for a long time, because it had got rather hard to maintain. After spending a lot of time this Christmas migrating the site, the last thing I really wanted was to spend more time tinkering with the style, but it was the best time to do it, so I gritted my teeth and tackled it.
There's not a huge visual difference, but it's much more organised behind the scenes, and uses the Blueprint CSS framework, which is much neater. I think that there's also a bit less markup now.
It's not totally finished, as I've got to polish a few things, and I haven't checked whether it validates, but it's good enough to leave for now.
Oh, and Happy New Year everyone! I'm about to go and show my face downstairs and remind my husband who I am!
24 Dec 2008
I probably won't be posting for a little while. I've got various family visits to make, and I've got to move all my various web sites to a new server. The latter will be lovely when it's done, but is currently causing me some headaches. At some point during the move, I'll put a temporary message up on this site while I'm shifting the virtual furniture around, but you should be directed to the new site automatically when it's all done.
Have a very peaceful and relaxing Christmas, everyone!
24 Dec 2008
There's nothing I like quite so much as a ghost story at Christmas. I hate horror films, but when the nights are dark and cosy I love settling down with the fairy lights and candles on, a glass of malt whisky in my hand, to watch a classic ghost story. M. R. James was the master of the genre, and I love his chilling tales (filmed for the BBC over many years), which let your imagination (rather than special effects) do all the work.
This year, we have Mark Gatiss' The Crooked House -- a three part ghost story in the classic mould of M. R. James. I think Gatiss is a bit of a polymath: an excellent actor, and a great writer for radio and TV. We've been recording the programmes, and watched the first last night (candles and fairy lights on, glass of whisky in hand, naturally). I was very impressed, and I'm really looking forward to the next two parts. He managed to make some wainscotting deeply scary, which -- considering that it involved very minimal special effects -- said a lot for the quality of writing and acting involved.
15 Dec 2008
14 Dec 2008
When the first series of The IT Crowd was shown, I thought it was funny, but bemoaned the way it stereotyped women as knowing nothing about computers and loving shoes. I still have a bit of a problem with that, but the second and now third series have got progressively better as the characters have settled in. A couple of weeks ago, the episode 'Are We Not Men?' really made me laugh, and also struck a whopping great big chord with me about the difficulty of fitting in when your interests are not gender-typical.
Moss and Roy (our IT Department geek heroes) are pottering about happily in their basement when the post guy starts up some football banter with Moss. Moss instantly shifts from his usual nasal, reedy voice, and picks up the banter in a deep voice with a Mockney accent. We cut to Roy, hands spread in wonder:
What was that? You were saying football things in a football voice, how do you know about football things?
We discover that like any self-respecting geek, Moss has turned to the Internet for a solution, specifically a site called bluffball.co.uk, which offers handy, stock Football Things to Say (with a pronunciation guide), to be deployed whenever you meet a Proper Man. The boys -- infuriated by the ability of Proper Men to make women laugh and fawn all over them -- decide to use their new-found, website-based banter skills to ingratiate themselves with some Big Normal Men. Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong when they get in out of their depth.
I loved the episode because it exactly mirrors the feeling I get when I try to talk to Proper Women. If there was a bluffball.co.uk type of site dedicated to allowing users to sound like they know about clothes and celebrities, I might be tempted. Or perhaps not.
12 Dec 2008
I've often thought that an easy way to measure the warmest point in any given room, when you don't have a thermometer handy, is to allow a cat into the room and watch where it settles. As the weather has been getting colder, Cleo has taken to giving herself a little cat sauna when the heating comes on. She sits side-on to the radiator in the bedroom, her left flank touching the surface, then turns her head towards it, so that her nose is only a few millimetres from the hot metal, as you can see in this photo.
The radiator is really hot to the touch, but her fur seems to insulate her sufficiently, and she just sits there quietly, soaking up the heat with her eyes closed. Once she's reached optimum temperature, she curls up on the bed and goes to sleep, thus adding to the tog rating of our duvet by donating a generous coating of her fluff. When the heating is on (morning and evening), our house stays at about 18-20°C, so it's hardly cold. Even when it's off, the insulation is good enough that it doesn't drop much below 16°C. Still, I'm sure if Cleo could operate the thermostat, it would be closer to 35°C, and hang the consequences for the environment and our bank balance.
10 Dec 2008
An admin announcement: Feedburner has been bought by Google, so they are now administering the RSS feeds for this site. The feed should be redirected automatically to the new URL, but if it isn't, then please update your RSS reader with the new URL for the feed: http://feedproxy.google.com/butshesagirl. I've changed the URLs on the page (such as the link in the sidebar to the right) to point to the new location.
Thanks!
08 Dec 2008
Ever since I saw a trailer for Wall-E early on, and the little robot reminded me of the strange parking meter/litter collecting machine on Wallace and Gromit's Grand Day Out, I've been looking forward to seeing the film. It took a while to come around on our LOVEFiLM queue, but it was really worth the wait.
I don't think I've seen such a perfect animated film in a long time (with the possible exception of Curse of the Were-Rabbit). The film is notorious for lacking dialogue for the first 40 minutes or so of the film, and yet it manages to convey the personality, hopes and fears of both of the main characters (Wall-E and Eve), and even makes a cockroach seem like a loveable pet. Wall-E's movements, little beeps and squeaks and the care with which he tends his collection of 'treasure' and his cockroach friend tells you all you need to know about him. Eve is -- by turns -- tender and fierce and spiky.
It's also quite a sharp satire on consumerism, showing the hapless passengers on the Axiom as fat, infantilized beings, suckling on "cup cakes in a cup" and staring zombie-like at the adverts and entertainment on their personal screens. Meanwhile, back on Scrapheap Earth, Wall-E gamely tootles about building skyscrapers out of their ancestors' compacted junk. I think it's a great shame and a missed opportunity that Pixar (or more likely, Disney) didn't choose to forego a bit of income and make a point by not having any merchandise to accompany the film.
There are some great little jokes and references in the film, but they are timeless enough that Wall-E is likely to be a classic film in the years to come. I laughed out loud at Wall-E's 'fully charged' chime sound, and his dithering about whether to put the plastic spork he had found with his plastic spoon or plastic fork collection, settling for placing it mid-way between the two. I also loved his groggy, uncoordinated early morning routine of trying to get the caterpillar tracks on his wheels before going out.
The soundtrack (including some wonderful ambient sounds produced by Ben Burtt - the DVD extra on the work he did is fascinating) is superb and subtle, with some very touching moments. I have to admit to getting a little moist-eyed when Louis Armstrong sang "La Vie en Rose". Even the short feature -- Burn-E -- on the DVD packs more entertainment into under 8 minutes than most full-length films. I love Burn-E's chirpy humming of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as he prepares to replace the damaged beacon, and his hang-dog posture when trying to get yet another beacon from the supply robot. The way the events of the main film are woven into his story, so that you see the unseen havoc unwittingly caused to Burn-E's ordered little world by Wall-E and Eve, is really brilliant. All that, and they managed to get a subtle little reference to "2001: A Space Odyssey" in as well.
07 Dec 2008
03 Dec 2008
02 Dec 2008
An interesting feature of my ride to work in recent weeks has been a series of chalked messages written on the wall by the South Gate of the University campus. The first one I saw (which happened to be on a Monday morning) was:
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH...
"Heh", I thought while waiting for the traffic lights to change, "it's funny because it's true. It's Monday morning and here I am, back at the ranch." It made me smile, and wonder who was posting these messages and why. Students were the obvious culprits, given the location, but that didn't answer the "why" (other than with "because they're students"). In these advertising-saturated times, it also occurred to me that it might be some kind of particularly cryptic viral ad campaign.
Then I saw another message, again on a Monday:
DON'T BE AFRAID IT'S ONLY LOVE
For some reason, that immediately planted an earworm of Kate Bush's 'And So is Love' from 'The Red Shoes'. The words are different, but the sentiment is similar, and that was apparently enough for my brain to place the needle in the groove on my mental vinyl.
Anyway, I'm intrigued. If I see any more messages (I've been going in a different gate so far this week for one reason or another), I'll report back via Twitter.