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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.

While listening to a Radio 4 documentary about The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (TUOoGB), I remembered an article I wrote — wow — nearly four years ago about how cover versions of songs and remakes of films are very rarely as good as the original, and are frequently worse. It struck me that TUOoGB are pretty much a universal exception to that rule. They play a lot of cover versions, and by some kind of weird voodoo which breaks all known laws, they manage to make the songs you dislike great and the songs you like brilliant, but brilliant in a different way to the original.

For example, I can’t say that I’ve ever liked the theme to ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, but when TUOoGB plays it, it’s a work of genius. I positively detest ‘Leaning on a Lampost’ in its original form by George Formby, but the Cossack version by TUOoGB is fantastic. Conversely, I love ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush, but the Working Men’s Club Crooner version by TUOoGB is terrific. And if you haven’t heard their gentle, folk version of ‘Anarchy in the UK’, you haven’t lived. I don’t know how they do it, but I’m guessing that it involves sacrificing chickens somewhere along the line.

Do yourself a favour and check out their law-defying antics on BBC iPlayer before they take it down.

I attended the Baggs Memorial Lecture on Happiness at the University of Birmingham on Monday, which this year was given by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. As memorial lectures go, the ‘Happiness Lecture’ is a quirky one. Thomas Baggs was born in Birmingham in 1889, and subsequently got a couple of degrees at the University. When he died, he left a bequest providing for an annual public lecture on happiness, specifically “Happiness — what it is and how it may be achieved by individuals as well as nations.” You could argue that a large sum of money would be better directed towards more directly practical purposes, but I love the fact that he left money for an academic lecture on happiness.

Andrew Motion started by saying that — while he was honoured to be asked to deliver the lecture — he did rather wonder whether someone on the committee had put his name forward for a dare. Poets are generally not renowned for their happiness, and he freely admitted that his own poems tended towards slight gloominess. Anyway, he did a great job, surveying the opinions of writers and philosophers throughout history about what makes people happy. He also — as you might expect given his profession — read a few poems illustrating his points. There were two in particular that I had never heard before and found completely ravishing. I love it when you hear or read a poem, and find some imagery that is totally unexpected and yet precisely captures the way you feel about something. I loved the following lines from ‘Postscript’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘Coming’ by Philip Larkin:

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans

— Postscript by Seamus Heaney

A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.

— Coming by Phillip Larkin

Motion’s own opinion was that you find happiness through the fulfilment of other things like creativity. Thinking about it on the way home, I also think that you can’t find happiness directly. Like the pursuit of love, the pursuit of happiness is doomed to failure. Instead, (and like love) it tends to turn up when you are least expecting it, but you have to be open to its possibility and recognise it when it arrives.

I had a dream the other night in which Mr. Bsag and I had not long moved into a new house (in reality, the last house we lived in, not the present one). We were in bed, asleep, in the early hours of the morning, when we got a phone call. It was Ben and Mena Trott, of Movable Type fame, and Ben was crying. He told me that they were the previous occupants of the house, and — by some mischance — they had left the only remaining copy of the source code¹ of Movable Type on an old computer in the house. He pleaded with me to make a copy and send it to him, but I had to tell him that we had got rid of the computer when we moved into the house. He was inconsolable, and I felt really bad about it.

My subconscious is weird sometimes.

¹ Yes, I know that since everyone who uses Movable Type has the source code, this can’t possibly have been true, but it was a dream and therefore not big on logical consistency. ↑

I went to the zoo last week¹, and found that watching the humans watching the animals was almost as interesting (and upsetting) as watching the animals themselves. They have a snow leopard, and as I approached the enclosure, I noticed a young man in his late teens, with an emo-ish air about him. He was standing in front of the glass viewing window, palm pressed to the glass, intently watching the snow leopard following its endless track around the cage. He was looking at the cat with such deep sympathy and sorrow that my heart went out to them both. He saw me, gave me a brief, hunted look and went back to his vigil.

Passing the enclosure later in the day, I saw the same chap. He was now sitting on the ground, leaning against the cage — still looking in. In the week since going to the zoo, I’ve thought about Snow Leopard Man a few times, and hoped that he manages to work through his sadness somehow.

¹ For work purposes, actually, which made a nice change of pace and scenery. ↑

I’ve complained before about the poor quality of modern appliances, and the difficulty of getting them repaired, and on occasions I’ve deliberately chosen items because I know that spare parts were available. When I bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner several years ago, it was partly for the performance (which is great), and partly because they promised to be easy to repair.

We had to put that to the test recently, when our trusty Dyson cut out and failed to power on again. We investigated the many inspection hatches for any blockages, and washed the reusable filter, but it wouldn’t turn on again. Luckily, we have a vacuum repair centre fairly close to us, and they are authorised Dyson distributors. The guy in the shop asked what had happened, and was confident they’d be able to fix it. A day later, our purple and green friend had a new power cable (which had developed a break inside the body of the machine), a few other worn parts were replaced, and it had a general service. The result is that our Dyson is working again, and we only had to pay a reasonable charge for the repair, rather than the full cost of a new one. There’s also one less hunk of garish plastic in landfill.

I wish more manufacturers put thought in to making their products easy to repair, and provided a supply of easily obtainable spare parts.

This is something I meant to post about ages ago, but forgot about. Via Denyerec, I read an article which suggested that going barefoot is healthier for your feet. It’s a long article, but an interesting one, and confirms a suspicion I’ve had for a long time that shoes — even sensible ones — constrain your feet and make you walk in an unnatural way. The conclusion seemed to be that heavily padded shoes make people plant their heels down much harder than they would with bare feet, thus placing more stress on all the joints of the leg. With no heel or sole padding — after a period of adjustment — people walk in a more fluid, softer way, placing the heel gently and rolling smoothly from the heel to the forefoot. Walking without shoes can also improve stability by allowing you to sense the form of the substrate, adjusting your balance and grip with small changes in the shape of the foot and the force applied.

I enjoy going barefoot when I can, because I love the sensation of the variety of textures under my soles. However, the local pastime around our way seems to be smashing glass bottles, so I usually only go barefoot at home or in the garden. When I first went to Brazil, I was amazed by the guides going barefoot in the forest, given that there were so many thorny branches and spiky leaves on the ground. Most people in the rural areas go barefoot most of the time, and our guide said he preferred to do so in the forest because he could move quietly. He did indeed move silently, while the rest of us clumped and rustled along like a herd of heffalumps¹ in our heavy boots, despite trying to walk quietly. His soles were as tough as leather from all the barefoot walking.

Denyerec linked to some ‘barefoot’ shoes made by Vibram called FiveFingers, which have an extremely thin, unpadded sole (just a thin layer of rubber to keep your feet clean and protect you from sharp stuff), and allow you to move each toe independently. They look intriguing, and I’d love to try a pair. I think that your feet would probably hurt like mad for a couple of days as they got used to the lack of padding and you changed the way you walked, then they’d feel wonderful. Has anybody got a pair? If so, what are they like?

¹ I nearly wrote ‘elephants’, but elephants move almost silently, except when pushing trees over. ↑