{blog_title}

I’ve started using Blogrolling to organise my blogroll. It’s all nicely sorted alphabetically, and recent updates (within the last 12 hours) are marked with an asterisk. It’s a really nice system, and makes it much easier to keep on top of the links.

You know, when I wrote my post about partworks I made up all of the titles except the ‘Understanding Your PC’ one. Shocking, I know, but call it creativity. Then I got a shock. We were watching something we’d videoed last night and fast-forwading through the adverts as is our custom, when what should flash by in a swirl of materialism but an advert for a partwork on miniature teapots! My gast was well and truly flabbered. I’m beginning to think that I might have a promising future in partwork publishing. Now, to go and pitch that ‘Worming Your Opposum’ idea to someone…

I spent two and a half hours yesterday glued to the radio listening to the first part of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, being serialised on Radio 4. By coincidence, I had just finished reading the last part of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. I had really enjoyed it, and as usual, worried a little about how well it would be adapted. The fact that I was glued for two and a half hours speaks volumes for the quality of the dramatisation. Of course, a few aspects got lost. A lot of the feeling in the book is built up gradually without being explicitly explained. The horror and pain that people in Lyra’s world feel when their daemon strays too far from them is implied so skilfully, that when the children get severed, you feel the impact fully and it is a genuinely moving moment. This didn’t really come across so powerfully on the radio. On the positive side, Iorek Byrnison’s voice (the armoured bear) was exactly as I imagined it.

If you haven’t read the trilogy, don’t be put off by the fact that it is billed as a children’s book. It certainly isn’t childish. Its themes are innocence, religion, consciousness, life, death, and love. It’s meaty stuff.

Mr. Butshesagirl and I watched an excellent program yesterday about Tyntesfield, the Victorian house near Bristol. As those of you who read this weblog regularly will know, I’m not one for adulating the past. I’m a big fan of technology, and get separation anxiety if I’m away from my computer for too long. But I do admire craftsmanship, and find the Victorian period interesting for all sorts of reasons.

{Read more...}

MacOSXHints had a great hint about using Project Builder (free on the Developer CD that comes with Jaguar) as a kind of scratchpad/organiser. I’m a devotee of Tinderbox, but in the interests of geeky research, I gave it a go. You know what? It’s a crazy idea, but it really works! If you’re short of cash and need something to organise your scribbles and notes, give it a try. You can either store your text files and so on in the project folder or just make a reference to the file and keep it where it is. I also found that you can drag URL clippings into the project, then control-click the clipping and choose ‘Open in Finder’. It then opens the URL in your browser. The find feature is excellent, and you can navigate around using the keyboard. Try this: command-0 to put the focus on the Project window, then start typing the name of the file you want. When it’s highlighted, hit return and you are in the editing window. Cool!

Tom Coates has a link to an interesting UpMyStreet conversation in Hackney, London. The UpMyStreet conversations are an interesting concept anyway: our communities are now so fragmented that it’s easier to talk to someone in the next street online than in person. In this case, that’s because there’s a crazed gunman besieging the street.

The last time I tried UpMyStreet out for my own area, I found an advert for a flat in the very same block that I live in. Now, we rent our place, but the price of this (identical) flat nearly made me choke on my tea. My landlady must never find out, or she’ll be putting the rent up.

I don’t hold much truck with resolutions: either they are so easy to keep that there isn’t much point in making them, or they are so hard to keep (and here I include those old favourites, ‘lose weight, get more exercise, be more organised’) that they are impossible to keep. I also question the sanity of trying to change your life at a time when it’s dark and cold, and you are deflated and depressed after the fun of the festivities. Still, I enjoy reading other people’s resolutions.

If I was forced at gunpoint to make a resolution, I would make it in the spring, and it would be to remember to live - it’s too easy these days to forget. I should look more, and see little things. I would also like to live more in the present. Worrying about the future is a quick way to suffocate yourself.

It’s been a rather damp start to the New Year here. As if it wasn’t bad enough going back to work after Christmas, I had to get there through a biblical deluge. The Isis (the Thames, for normal people¹) has grown enormously. I might curse the fact that I live on a hill when I have to cycle back up it, but it does mean that I don’t get soggy carpets three times a year.

¹ Oxford people are a funny lot: the river has a perfectly serviceable name, but they have to go and give it another one with Classical pretentions so that the plebs won’t get the reference.

The newest build of NetNewsWire Pro allows the display of the date and category of a post. It’s a really nice feature, but to take advantage of it, you need my RSS 1.0 feed. Click on the XML Summaries image in the sidebar and copy the resulting URL into NetNewsWire’s subscribe dialogue. Even if you use another news reader, I would appreciate it if you could use the new feed. In news readers that support it, it will only fetch headlines if there is anything new available, which saves my bandwidth.

While I’m on the subject, if any of you have clicked on my XHTML or CSS validation links recently, you are probably thinking, “You big fat liar - it doesn’t validate!” Oops. A few errors had crept into the XHTML when I forgot to switch off automatic paragraph generation when I added my own paragraph tags, and there were a few other minor problems. I broke the CSS when I updated the design a few days ago. I think I’ve sorted all the problems out now, but let me know if you find any other errors.

So how did you celebrate the New Year? We decided not to venture out into the cold and wet (Oxford is also curiously dead at New Year), and instead planned an evening in. We got a great Chinese take-away from The Oriental Condor (not Asian-Andean fusion food, as you might conclude from the name). We had a bottle of red and a bottle of sparkling wine, and watched “The Big Lebowski” for the nth time. I swear that that film gets funnier every time I see it. The dialogue alone would make it a classic, but the music and set pieces are just superb. The Busby Berkeley/Wagner dream sequence always makes me gasp for air because I laugh too much. The Dude is truly a hero for our times - The Dude abides, man, The Dude abides.

This was a post-Christmas purchase, and a very good one, too. I have another of their albums, Spirit of the Century, and this is every bit as good. It’s a lovely mix of blues, gospel and spirituals, sung by some guys who have been singing together for 60 years, and assisted by Robert Randolph and Ben Harper. You can hear their experience in every song. Their voices are like beautiful, old wooden chairs - polished to a fine, warm patina by their lives.

{Read more...}

You might have noticed a new barcode-like image at the top of this page. It’s a linear plot of the posting times for all my entries in the current month, courtesy of a cool little plugin written by Nilesh Chaudhari. What’s the point of it? Well, there isn’t one. It looks cool and reminds me of a time when I used to work on pigeon navigation, and had to deal with orientation data using circular statistics (time is circular too). As you can see, I’m an afternoon/evening blogger (primarily because, when I’m not on holiday, I have to post entries after work). There will be a new (and mostly blank) plot tomorrow as it’s a new month and a New Year. Have a great one, folks!

I’ve just finished reading “The Science of Discworld” by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. The book alternates chapters based in Discworld, where Ponder Stibbons has created a miniature cosmos called “Roundworld”, and chapters in which the science of our own world (from the Big Bang to the present day) is explained. I have a confession to make. I’m a biologist, but I don’t really like reading popular science books for fun, or indeed any non-fiction. Call me mad, but after a long day at work doing science¹, the last thing I want to do of an evening is read more about it: give me fiction, and the more escapist, the better. So I approached this book with the secret, guilty intention of quietly skipping over the science chapters.

{Read more...}

Yes, it’s that time of year again. The time to start collecting that new partwork on Understanding Your PC/Collecting Miniature Teapots/Worming Your Opossum. Who buys these things, and more importantly, why? You can buy a book with identical information in it, and pay about the same, so why wait every week for some pathetic little magazine thing? Do they need that sense of anticipation? Or can they only digest a certain number of words at a time before their brain becomes dangerously overloaded, and might explode? My theory is that the publishers rely on some kind of New Year related enthusiasm to start a hobby. I’m betting that 99.9% of people buy less than three parts and then lose interest in the nuggets of opossum worming wisdom. But there must be a few people who do, in fact, have a complete partwork set. I think they need help.

It struck me when I went home to my parents for Christmas, that you never really leave your former selves behind. Superficially, a lot has changed in the house that I grew up in, but when I walk around in it, I keep finding myself drifting into layers of my childhood - seeing myself aged 5 or 9 or 13. There’s an old Russian saying that you can’t step in the same river water twice. That may be true, but the family home seems to act more like a lake or pool, and the water stays in layers. This isn’t a bad thing - I had a very happy childhood - but it is odd when you are a grown woman visiting with your husband.

For as long as I can remember, the bolt on the bathroom door only slid half way because, when I was little, I stuck a green crayon into the bolt’s staple (in a spirit of scientific enquiry), and the crayon broke off. Dad (amid a good deal of muttered cursing) tried to get the stub of the crayon out with a knife, but nothing would budge it. So there it stayed for the next 15 years or so, impeding the progress of the bolt. My parents redecorated the bathroom a few years ago and replaced the bolt, but when I go in there, I’m still surprised when it slides all the way home.