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My parents live in a very suburban part of Surrey¹, but they have always attracted a lot of wildlife to their garden. They have plenty of bird feeders and get a wide variety of avian visitors, and they’ve seen foxes regularly for a number of years. Recently, however, they’ve been getting species that you don’t usually associate with suburban gardens, like roe deer. The foxes have also been getting tamer (probably partly because my parents and some of their neighbours put out food for them), and they spend a lot of time relaxing in the garden during daylight hours, rather than visiting at night just to grab some food.

I visited at the weekend, and saw their latest wild/tame fox. It comes right down to the bottom of the garden, near the house, and lounges around on the lawn. You can go outside and stand a few metres away from it, and it just carries on with what it is doing. I went out and took some photographs here and here, and it more or less ignored me. I love watching wild animals, and it’s a real privilege when a wild animal carries on with its life while you watch from close quarters. It came over to collect some of the dog food, then went and buried a few pieces in a nearby flower bed. I don’t think it would be there when it went back for it later, because there were a couple of magpies nearby, carefully noting where the food was stored. Apparently, the magpies often try to steal its food, but it cleverly waits calmly until my Dad comes outside and scares the magpies off, then goes back to feeding. It’s certainly not malnourished and has the sleek, well-fed look of a pampered, Stockbroker Belt fox.

¹ Well, most of Surrey is very suburban, to be fair. ↑

I’ve just signed up to a new service (currently in beta, natch) called blippr. You’ve probably already guessed from the missing ‘e’ that blippr is a social web service. It offers ‘Radically Short Ratings and Reviews’ for books, films, games and music. The idea is that you ‘blip’ items, rating them on a four-point scale and writing a short review if you like. It’s a little like Twitter in that you only get 160 characters for your reviews, which is both a good and bad thing. If I really like something, I want more space than that to write about it, but on the other hand, I often put off writing about stuff I listened to, watched or read in my media section, because it will take too long to write a full review.

The real benefit is that — when a few more people have signed up — it should provide a great way for people with tastes you admire to recommend things you would probably enjoy. I’ve also started using it as a wishlist to note down things I’d like to get see, read or listen to. I tend to read reviews and get interested in something, then forget to note it down anywhere.

I’ve only just started using it, but it’s interesting so far. My profile is here, and if you’d like to try blippr for yourself, I have 3 invitations to give away.

I’m a bit of a pen fanatic. I love all kinds of pens and pencils, from gel pens to fountain pens and mechanical pencils. When I went to Japan (a wonderful country for pen fanatics) a couple of years ago, I bought a Zebra brilliant multi-pen, which had black, blue, red and green ballpoints in it. I’ve used it a lot, so the ink has almost run out, and I couldn’t find any suitable refills for it. Multi-pens are often a little more bulky than single colour ones, but I love the convenience of having multiple colours with only one pen to carry around. One thing the Japanese Zebra pen lacked, though, was a pencil.

I’ve just got another Zebra multipen — the Airfit 2+S pictured above — which has a black and red ballpoint and a mechanical pencil. It has seen heavy service recently with all the marking I’ve been doing. I like to write comments on the scripts in red (sometimes a lot of red), and comments on the mark sheet in black. I write the actual mark in pencil until I’ve had a chance to check all the scripts again and make sure that I haven’t had a moment of idiocy and misjudged a paper. The Airfit is great for this, because I can just use one pen and click between the functions. It makes me feel like some kind of marking superhero, which — half way through a stack of scripts of a certain height — is absolutely vital to my mental health.

The pen is a bit slimmer than my old Zebra because it has 3 functions rather than 4, and you rotate the barrel to select the function, which has a nice positive feel. Both the ballpoints and the mechanical pencil are of good quality, and I know I can get refills.

Recently, our cat Cleo has developed a couple of obsessions:

Obsession 1 - the airing cupboard: We have an airing cupboard on the upstairs landing, housing the hot water tank, clean towels and a variety of cat-trapping voids and spaces. She has never shown a lot of interest in the cupboard until now, but suddenly it seems to have become her aim in life to get in there against all odds. As soon as you open the door, she appears from nowhere, desperately trying to get into the cupboard. Unfortunately we have to open the door a few times a day, because the only way to turn off the hot water coming out of the shower is to use the stopcock in the airing cupboard (it’s a long story). Since we don’t want Cleo in the cupboard because of the aforementioned clean towels and cat-trapping voids, we regularly have a fun few minutes wrestling with a squirming cat while soaking wet from the shower and trying to preserve our dignity with a towel.

Obsession 2 - Springwatch: Yes, that Springwatch. Again, she’s never shown much interest in the TV before, but as soon as the birds turned up on Springwatch last night, she was stalking the TV, ending up sitting on the bench a few centimetres away from the screen, batting at the giant coal tit chicks on the webcam, and even — in one highly inappropriate moment — Bill Oddie’s crotch. We saw most of the programme obscured by a furry, feline outline, then when it ended she gave a brief chirrup and wandered off to sleep.

I’ve been getting a fair bit of spam slipping through Akismet’s fingers recently, so I’ve decided to turn comment moderation on and see how it goes. Please feel free to comment as usual, but remember that your comment won’t show up immediately. If you are a spammer, your comment won’t turn up at all!

I watched an interesting programme last night which found out what happened to people who had participated in some documentaries in the 1970s: “What Happened Next?” This episode caught up with a group of people who lived like Iron Age people for a whole year. They built their own roundhouse out of timber, thatch and wattle and daub, milked their own goats and ate gritty soaked wheat for breakfast. In contrast to modern reality shows, the focus of the original documentary seemed to be on exploring the processes involved rather than the personalities. It was more like a year-long experimental archeology experiment, rather than a reality show. There was a bit of conflict between one family and the rest of the participants, but other than that, they seemed to get on quietly with the required work without creating any fuss.

It was quite an impressive achievement, really. They did have some training from experts, but they turned their hands to house building, milking, blacksmithing, fishing, butchery and basket weaving, among other skills. They lived as comfortably as you can do as an Iron Age person, and they had enough to eat — if a rather boring diet. The participants went on to do a variety of things, from special needs teaching to software engineering, but all seemed to take away a certain confidence and competence from their experience. It must be quite comforting to know that — if the worse came to the worse — you have the skills to survive in quite a primitive environment. One of the participants said something to the effect that Iron Age people and modern people are the same: we all use our skills to the best of our abilities in the environment in which we live.

One thing that made me laugh was the obvious lack of Health and Safety involvement in the original documentary. People wobbled at the top of fragile looking ladders while handling huge logs, wood was trimmed with a billhook towards the person helping to hold the timber, and in a memorable scene which made me cringe every time I saw the trailer, a naked man used a chisel while propping one foot up on a bit of wood. I’m quite surprised that they still had all their bits attached at the end of the year.

Perhaps it’s because it is Bike to Work day today in San Francisco, but there seems to have been a lot of controversy stirred up on the web this week by the gentle art of cycling.

First, there was the ridiculous assertion that cycling is less efficient in terms of energy consumption than driving, as if we — in developed countries — need to consume any extra food to fuel our cycle rides or as if drivers fast to compensate for the energy not used when driving their cars. I could go on…

And then a post by jwz, offering his own advice for people wanting to start cycling in San Francisco, attracted an enormous pile of enraged comments, many from other cyclists upset by his recommendation to “Never take bike advice from anyone who owns bike shorts, clip shoes, a messenger bag, or a fixie.” I don’t necessarily agree with all his advice either (though he did make it clear that it was specific to the cycling situation in San Francisco), but I wouldn’t get upset about it. People cycle for all kinds of different reasons, and have their own preferences, requirements and constraints. There really is more than one way to do it.

I suppose that I don’t understand why cycling inspires such ire in people. If you’re not being harassed by drivers (or anyone else who seems to take it as a personal rebuke that you are using a eco-friendly mode of transportation), or or pedestrians, or being taunted by gangs of school children, or having your tyres shredded by the glassy remains of outdoor binge-drinking sessions that seem a permanent fixture next to every park bench in Birmingham, other cyclists also seem to want to join in.

Of course, some cyclists act like idiots, just like some drivers and some pedestrians, but does that have to mean that the rest of us who just want to potter quietly to work have to take the rap? In that context, watching this video of a school run in the Netherlands (via Velorution) made me want to cry — it’s like glimpsing Utopia. All those comfortable, sensible, load-bearing bikes! The broad, glass-free, well-maintained cycle paths! The people cycling calmly along in their ordinary clothes, and not wearing helmets! The hordes of children cycling with their parents! Sigh.

I’ve been trying to write another grant proposal recently (a seemingly Sisyphean task for academics), but I ended up a bit stuck. It was a collaborative idea that a colleague and I sketched out last year, but which — for one reason or another — ended up on the back-burner for a while. I was really struggling to pull it together. We had plenty of ideas, but I was having trouble rearranging and grouping them into a sensible structure and seeing gaps that needed to be filled. Finally, I decided to blow the dust of my copy of Tinderbox and try that.

I wish I’d done it earlier. I used to use Tinderbox a lot for writing notes and organising ideas¹, but newer, shinier applications have come along, and I’ve gradually turned to them. But Tinderbox is still a great tool, and it really excels at visual brainstorming. If you open a map view, you can just hammer out short notes containing all your ideas, then group them into similar themes later. With a linear outliner (a view which Tinderbox also has), you end up worrying more about where stuff should fit than what the important ideas are.

Once I’d got all the ideas down, I made some adornments (‘sticky notes’ on the page to visually group notes), and started moving notes around, first into similar ideas, then dividing them into aims, questions, hypotheses, techniques and random things to remember. Once that was done, I moved back to the linear outline view, and tidied things up, fleshing out the outline a bit as I went. It was really effective, and almost fun²! While Tinderbox can export notes quite easily as text (or HTML or XML), I probably won’t bother to do so in this case, because I was just using it as a tool for thinking rather than writing. I’ve started to write the final document with the Tinderbox outline view open to guide my writing, and it’s working really well.

¹ I even constructed, managed and wrote this weblog with it when I first started blogging. ↑

² Something which can make grant writing even almost fun is a miraculous tool, in my opinion. ↑

A couple of days ago, I came home to find that I had received a call from the security department of my credit card provider. I panicked a bit, of course, but called them straight away. They told me that they had flagged up a couple of transactions as suspicious, and gave me the details of the dodgy items. To my great relief, the transactions had actually been made by me, so there was no problem.

I have no idea why those particular transactions were seen as suspicious, but I’d certainly rather have a few false positives than for them to miss genuinely fraudulent transactions. I was also quite impressed that they phoned me to check. However, the whole experience did feel a little bit like my Mum reading my credit card statement and pointing out items in a slightly disapproving way: “Now, this one here — did you really need to buy that, it was rather pricey. And this one, what was that for?”

It must the technology breakdown season or something: after the amp blew a capacitor, both our ancient TV and the less ancient Freeview box started to go on the blink. The Freeview box was crashing and needed to be rebooted and retuned several times a week, always — as luck would have it — just as some programme we wanted to catch from the beginning was starting. When I was a kid, we used to have to turn our old black and white set on a few minutes early to let it ‘warm up’, so this didn’t feel like great progress. The TV was also having picture and sound problems, which pretty much covers all the critical elements necessary for a satisfying TV-watching experience.

So we bit the bullet and joined the 21st Century by buying a widescreen LCD TV which was in a sale. After living with a 20 inch 4:3 format CRT screen for so many years, the 32 inch 16:9 TV seems gigantic. No more do we have to squint at the narrow strip of slightly fuzzy picture when sitting more than a couple of metres away. It has made the whole TV, DVD or EyeTV recording-watching process much more enjoyable now that we can actually see the visual details properly and hear the dialogue and sound effects clearly.

The radical change in the quality of our viewing experience (and the earlier improvement in our listening setup with the new amp) prompted me to rearrange the living room. The room isn’t large, so rearranging the furniture is a bit like a slightly frustrating game of Tetris, but I think the new arrangement works better. We used to have the sofa at one side of the living room and quite close to the TV because of the size of the screen. This meant that we were at an awkward angle to it, and had the speakers on the other side of the room, at right angles to the TV. Now that we can sit a healthy distance from the screen and still see it, we could put the sofa across the end of the room, facing the TV. That also meant that I had space to move the speakers either side of the TV, so that we can supplement the TV’s speakers with the floorstanders — it’s poor-man’s surround sound, but it definitely adds to the experience. Also, since the speakers are firing down the long axis of the room instead of the short axis, it works better with the acoustics of the room.

The expression of Cleo (our cat) the first time she walked into the rearranged room was priceless. She looked at where the sofa used to be and did the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a double-take in a cat. Then she looked at me with a “What the hell’s going on? Where’s all my stuff?” look for a bit, before settling a bit grumpily on the sofa in its new position.

While watching House the other day, I was thinking again about the different accents in English-speaking countries. There seems to be a weird non-symmetrical effect in how easy people in one English-speaking country seem to find it to recognise the native accent of another English-speaking country.

For example, Hugh Laurie seems to me to be able to produce quite a convincing American accent (note that my point here is about how easy it is to recognise an accent, not reproduce it, which is much harder). However, as a British-English speaker, it’s perhaps not surprising if I can’t pick up the subtleties of an American-English accent. But many American viewers find his accent very authentic, and are often amazed to find out he’s British. There’s a running gag in Flight of the Conchords about Americans thinking Bret and Jemaine are British rather than New Zealanders. When I went to the States, many people I met thought I was Australian.

It doesn’t seem to by a symmetrical effect. Dick Van Dyke’s wincingly bad Cockney accent in Mary Poppins set a new benchmark for bad accents, but even American actors with reasonably good mimicry skills can be detected¹. Adam Monroe did a pretty good British accent as Takezo Kensei in Heroes, but I could tell immediately that he was not a native British-English speaker before I knew what his nationality was. Other American-English speaking actors who have attempted British-English accents (like Gwyneth Paltrow), have often been quite convincing, but their accent is still detectable to British-English speakers as non-native. Meanwhile, many Australian actors use British-English or American-English accents, and I can’t tell that they are not native speakers.

Note that I’m honestly not getting at Americans here. British people have similar troubles telling a Canadian accent from an American one, or an Australian accent from a New Zealand one. I have particular trouble telling South Africans from New Zealanders, unless the accents are fairly extreme, or the person says particular words (“six” being a handy diagnostic feature). I’m just wondering why — even between pairs of accents — there’s a non-symmetrical effect in how easy either party finds it to recognise the accent of the other. Is it a matter of exposure to the accent? We certainly get a lot of American TV, films and music in Britain. Or is it because we have a wider range of native accents in Britain (I’m not even sure if this is true), so our ears are more highly tuned to detecting differences? It could even be something to do with the time of divergence of the accents from the ancestral stock.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m intrigued by the problem.

¹ I’d be interested to know if his accent sounds reasonably authentic to an American-English speaker, though. ↑

As regular readers will know, my nom de keyboard of ‘bsag’ and the title of this blog both refer to the look which comes over someone’s face (usually male) when I exhibit signs of knowing something about technical matters (see my About page for more details).

I had a classic example of BSAG earlier this week when I had to contact some heating engineers about our boiler. We’ve dealt with these particular people before, and they are great: they are nice guys, do good work and charge a reasonable price. However, they really don’t seem able to handle the fact that — while neither Mr. Bsag and I are experts on heating systems — I know a bit more about it than my husband. I started to explain what I thought the problem was, but they asked if they could speak to Mr. Bsag. I could have put my foot down, but since I’d dealt with them before (an experience very similar to those experienced by Arabella Weir’s ‘Invisible Woman’ character on the Fast Show), I knew that it was a losing battle.

So I handed the phone over, and we had a farcical exchange where the heating engineers would ask Mr. Bsag some technical question on the phone, he would ask me, I would answer, and he would tell the engineers what I’d just said. It worked out OK in the end, because they came and fixed the problem (which was indeed a faulty control board, as I’d thought), but it would have been a bit easier if they’d actually believed that I knew what I was talking about. Sigh.

I finally managed to get a new amplifier an Audiolab 8000a from ebay. I wired it up last night with my new speaker cables (The Chord Company Carnival Silver Screen) and I’ve been enjoying discovering our music collection again.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I’m pretty familiar with this Audiolab model, because my Dad had one for years. In fact, I’d even heard it with my current speakers, because they also used to belong to my Dad. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how much my old amp must have been deteriorating over the last 6 months or so, because I was blown away by the quality of this amp. It gives an enormous amount of what we audiophiles call ‘wellie’ (a technical term, you understand). So much so that I had to dive for the volume control because I wasn’t prepared for what would come out of the speakers. The volume knob starts at about the 7 o’clock position, and 9 o’clock is more than enough to fill the room. The sound is gloriously transparent, so I can hear the wonderful warm quality of my Rega Planet CD player, as well as the totally different quality of the AR turntable. In short, all the sources sound different, which is just as it should be. The speaker cables probably need a little while to bed down, but I’m very happy with it.

I like a nicely balanced sound, but it is nice to hear properly weighty base again. When I was testing the system out yesterday, I played a few tracks from ‘Knives to the Treble’ by Burning Babylon via the SliMP3. A huge grin spread over my face, and I ran to get Mr. Bsag, dragging him into the living room. “Sit down here and feel the sofa vibrate!” It wasn’t overdone, just very, very deep.

I was quite excited about the prospect of Automator when it was introduced, because it offered the prospect of being able to write quick scripts to solve little workflow problems, without having to know much about AppleScript. I can code in a number of languages (not brilliantly, but enough to get by), but for some reason, I find AppleScript quite difficult. It looks enough like English that you’re lulled into thinking you know what you’re doing until you get tripped up by some odd syntax. Anyway, Automator allows you to cobble together pre-built building blocks, recorded actions, and little shell scripts (in Python, Perl or Ruby as well as bash and other common shells) so that you don’t need to write Applescripts if you don’t want to.

Despite this convenience, I haven’t used Automator quite as much as I’d thought I would, partly because applications like Butler lets you do a lot of things you might use Automator for, but in a more accessible way. However, there are occasions when a nicely crafted Automator workflow is very handy.

Mr. Bsag often has to send photographs or scans of his prints to galleries, and they often insist on a 300dpi TIFF. He stores these images in iPhoto, and while you can certainly export as TIFF, I haven’t found an easy way to change the DPI (though you can do it in Preview in Leopard). However, you can change the DPI property of an image using the commandline tool, sips, as well as lots of other handy things. But Mr. Bsag wouldn’t be comfortable with a commandline command, which would bring it back to me doing it for him, and I’m lazy. Enter Automator!

I made a quick workflow (see an image of the steps here) which gets the selected items in Finder, puts a dialog box to say what it is going to do an allow an escape, runs a Ruby script which calls a sips command on the arguments to change the DPI and convert to TIFF, then speaks a confirmation of how many files were converted. I made it into a Finder plug-in¹, so that Mr. Bsag could just export his chosen images from iPhoto to the desktop, select them, then use the contextual menu to run the script. It seems to work fine. For common tasks like this where you want to batch convert some files to a standard format, Automator is ideal.

¹ The documentation for Automator says that if you make a workflow a Finder plugin, you should remove the first ‘Get selected Finder items’ step. When I did this it acted as if nothing was selected. With the selected Finder items step in place, it counts each selected file twice. Weird. In the final plug-in, I hacked around this by simply dividing num by 2. ↑

I’ve been meaning to link to this article by Maciej Ceglowski for ages, but forgetting to do it. I love Maciej’s writing: he doesn’t post very frequently, but when he does, it’s really worth waiting for. He’s really funny (I laughed out loud several times while reading this piece), but he also has a wonderful way of evoking the feeling of a place, and making you feel as if you know the characters he writes about.

My favourite part, however, is right at the end:

Each week I brute force my way through a dance with these gracious partners, and each week they are quick to assure me it wasn’t nearly as much of a Calvary for them as it had been the week before. As one of them said to me sweetly after what I thought was a rare successfully-executed figure, “Don’t worry. Someday you will know what you are doing.”

I feel like that all the time — someday I will know what I am doing.