Look out! It’s the flesh-eating beetle larvae!

This week's bravery award goes to the camera people involved in the "Omnivores" episode of The Life of Mammals. First there were the grizzly bears. Big, hungry grizzly bears. I feared for the cameraman on that one, not to mention David Attenborough. I was on the edge of the sofa shouting, "Look behind you - there's a big hungry bear!" David's such a pro that he carried on with his effortless, unruffled delivery while, barely 50m behind him, half-starved bears galloped about after salmon. I wouldn't fancy my chances of out-running one if it decided I was coveting its fish.

Then there was the bat cave. Paul Stewart (the cameraman) must have really picked the short straw for that particular assignment. I can imagine the scene: they draw lots. "Yay! Platypus in Australia!". "Woohoo! African savanna!". Then Paul picks his assignment. "Oh bugger." The others are all laughing and chanting, "Paul's got the bat cave, Paul's got the bat cave..."

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Steve Jobs read my mind

Today was the red-letter day an any Mac-aholic's iCal: MacExpo. I watched the streamed keynote live, practically vibrating with geekish glee at all the goodies on offer. But when Steve got to Keynote, I nearly exploded with excitement. You see, I've been grumbling and grousing about the myriad shortcomings of Powerpoint to myself for ages. Only yesterday, while I was trying to update my Powerpoint-based lectures, the straw finally broke the camel's back, and I looked around on the web for an alternative. Unfortunately, I could find nothing which would do what I needed.

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The Two Towers as you’ve never read it before

Lemonlye has written a brilliantly funny (and affectionate) parody of The Two Towers. The three-way telepathy call is particularly hilarious. It's just the kind of thing I would have written if I was witty and intelligent.

Blogrolling

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 must be kidding!

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...

Some superb drama

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.

Victoriana

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.

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101 uses for Project Builder

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!

Besieged

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.

New Year, New Resolutions

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.

Soggy

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.

New RSS feed

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.

The morning after

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.

The Blind Boys of Alabama - Higher Ground

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.

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Blogtimes

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!

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