A Small Blue Thing

I think I may be feeling a bit fed up at the moment.

I had an odd dream the other night where I was having breakfast in a hotel and the tasty selection of muesli, yoghurt and fruit that I had chosen was cleared away before I had a chance to eat. In the dream I burst into tears - proper sobs of loss - which if you know me at all is most unlike my normal stoical behaviour.

Last night I came to play Plants vs Zombies on my Macbook. For some reason, my save game got lost in the ether and I was back to the start with no zen garden, and no endless survival mode to be seen. On the Steam login it still says I have 28 hours of play logged, but I have nothing to show for it. This upset me more than is logically sensible for such a trivial thing as a video game, much less one I have happily completed multiple times on my iPhone.

Daft, I know. Still, try to stay positive and all that, and keep looking forward to lighter days as the year progresses. In another week or two it should be at least starting to get light as I leave the house as well as being light for some of the trip home in the evening.

Sunday Links

• First Baby Black Rhino in 20 Years for St. Louis ZooBorns
• Richard Herring standup set on Russell Howard's Good News Extra
• Future Timeline Fascinating futurology blog (h/t Steve!)
• Dimensions A fascinating and useful website from the BBC that puts the size of things such as natural disasters into meaningful context.
• Orrery Quite the most beautiful illustration of orbital mechanics that I have seen, with the option of switching from a Copernican model to an Earth centered one
• Scale What would the planets look like if they orbited the Earth at the same distance as the moon?
• IBM 100 x 100 100 years of IBM
• Valentine's Bleeding Hearts Cakes
• APOCALYPSE MOBY Apocalypse Now + Moby Dick = AWESOME!
• Best action scene ever. ever. ever. Nobody does action movies quite like Bollywood
• Greta Garbo Iconic photos
• The most iconic, stylish, and just plain wacky opening credits on television how many of these do you remember?
• Logo Design Gone Wrong
• The King's Speech: good movie, very bad history Hitch has a few bones to pick
• The Thomas Beale Cipher: A Short Film by Andrew Allen
• BoxCar2D Watch a car evolve by random mutation and natural selection

Catfish

New York photographer Yaniv Schulman forms an unlikely internet friendship after one of his pictures is transformed into a painting by a talented eight year old artist called Abby. He exchanges messages on Facebook with Abby's mother Angela, and finds that he is becoming attracted to Abby's 19 year old half sister Megan. Their growing online relationship is documented by two filmmakers - Yaniv's brother Arial and friend Henry Joost who sense an opportunity to tell a story as events unfold when Yaniv makes the trip from New York to rural Michigan to meet Megan and her family.

This is a film that should be seen without knowing more than the basic premise if at all possible, but if you have ever wondered about the real people behind Facebook profiles then this will appeal to you.

Highly recommended.

The Fort by Bernard Cornwell

The Fort by Bernard Cornwell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In June of 1779 a force of seven hundred British soldiers and marines, transported by a handful of Royal Navy vessels, were dispatched to the town of Majabigwaduce on the Penobscot river to establish a fortification and take control of the surrounding area. Under the command of the veteran General Francis McLean they began to construct their defenses, but they had barely had time to construct simple earthworks no higher than a man's waist before the American revolutionaries in Boston raised a force of over a thousand men and forty ships against them with orders to 'Captivate, kill and destroy' the occupying forces.

Despite some initial successes, the American forces fell into disarray with neither the militia forces under Brigadier General Solomon Lovell nor the naval force of Commodore Dudley Saltonstall being willing to risk pressing home the attack. Will the British be able to survive a prolonged siege under the bombardment of the American guns, or will the Americans find a way of making use of their superior numbers?

Cornwell tells the story from both sides of the conflict, interspersed with letters, orders and contemporary accounts of the battle. Notable characters from history are featured, including the first taste of battle for the Lt. John Moore who was to rise to the rank of Lieutenant-General in the Peninsular war thirty years later, and Paul Revere who proves not to be the paragon of revolutionary fervor of popular belief.

Another excellent historical work, from the creator of Sharpe.



View all my reviews

Go

Tonight's Saturday chillout selection is the DVD of Lemon Jelly - 64 - 95 with full DTS 5.1 in effect. Yum.

Today saw the official start of my T215 Communication and information technologies course, and I made good headway in the section for data storage technologies. I've been using a wiki editor to make notes with which is a quick and easy method of keeping track of things and also allows me to export it in a form that goes straight onto my Kindle for reference.

Not much else to report, so have a picture of my study area ...

Mine

Games Boo

Close to the Edit

The culmination of a stressful couple of days came today when I found out that a change to the software requested as an urgent fix for the year end that I have rushed to get done today won't actually be needed as the situation that it might apply to doesn't occur in their system. The change hasn't really been properly tested and has gone out in the service pack, with an attendant risk of breaking something else. Bah!

Still, seeing as I got in for 8:15 this morning and worked through my lunch hour, I felt perfectly justified in snucking out of the office at half past four, meaning that I drove most of the way home with a smidge of light in the sky and missed the start of the rush hour, giving me a reasonable journey for once. Hurrah!

Anyhoos, I think it may well be time to listen to some podcasts and play a bit of Plants vs Zombies Zen Garden to unwind ...

Back up a little bit

My daily commute to Leeds is really getting me down at the moment. With the roadworks and the slow traffic in the dark and the rain, it's taking over an hour each way. Last night was even worse as there had been an accident on the motorway - I left the office just before five and didn't get home until nearly seven.

Work has been busy too, with a release due to go out and the usual mad scramble to get stuff tested and included. We've also been interviewing for a new developer post which means time to read cvs and prepare for interviews in our copious free time.

On top of this, I'm trying to put in an hour or two of OU work a day, until I get an idea of how much time T215 is going to be taking up over the next couple of months when I am studying in parallel to M255. I don't want to lose momentum, and it would be all too easy to slack off when I am feeling tired and end up losing my head start.

So, all in all, tired.

Haikusday

Evidence ignored
Of rising temperatures
And melting ice caps

Grey clouds fringed with light
The morning sunrise advanced
By three more minutes

Java one point five
Automagically wraps
Primitive data

King's men, outnumbered
Scratch a fort in the cold earth
And trounce the rebels

Motorway traffic
Crawling through the rain soaked dusk
Two hours to get home

Primeval Update

Busy day at work, preceded by a busy weekend of mostly OU work, so in lieu of a proper update, here is a rundown of my recent telly viewing

• Dino of the week - some weird giant axolotl sort of thing
• Body count - 3 (including one severed leg, and two missing presumed chomped)
• Movie references - a pub full of yokels goes quiet when the two youngsters walk in with their fancy city ways
  
• Stupid behaviour of the week - Abby's ray gun gets knocked under a camper van, so she challenges the monster by waving at it
  
• ARC arc plot - Connor gets inducted into a sooper sekrit project and Irish new bloke has another gnomic conversation with mysterious cancer guy
  
• Lady Lara Croft gets shut in a tomb, and Bill Sykes and Irish new bloke have a fight in a graveyard for no readily apparent reason
• Abby running round in her pants - 0
  

All in all, top notch teatime telly!

In other telly news, it was nice to see a new series of Nurse Jackie pop up in the schedules. We really enjoyed the previous series when it was on, for the sharp writing and refreshing spin on the usual tropes of medical drama. Also, Edie Falco has the most amazingly enormous blue eyes.

Finally, B&Q Man was back on last night, as well, also, and was enjoyable enough, even though it still feels like four or five completely separate stories shoehorned into the same hour long slot. Also, Robson Greene as a werewolf? Exsqueeze me?

Sunday Links

• Baby Anteater Clings Tight to the Mom-Mobile Big schnozzle action on ZooBorns
• The frontier is everywhere A fan-remix video homage to NASA + Carl Sagan
• Strangely beautiful portraits of the most polluted places in America
• Mortality statistics Every cause of death in England and Wales visualised
• Thog-o-Matic Random Selector Random examples of bad SF and fantasy prose
• How to Publish Your Book on Amazon Kindle Useful step by step guide
• Hunx And His Punx Two free garage punk tracks
• as3sfxr Chip tune sound generator
• Goblin War Machine Squash the puny humans and upgrade your war machine
• Movie Triangles A superb puzzle game for iPhone and web - match the movie stars to the films

U sed dere was a mowsie back here?

Guest picture by cerebralpig!

Friday Boo

DO WANT!

See here for more details.

Today I Die Again

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you should go and download Today I Die Again right now. It will take you no more than ten or fifteen minutes to play, and I guarantee you it will be a thought provoking and moving experience.

Trust me on this one.

Like Clockwork

It's been a while since I did one of these - my morning routine runs like this:

• 06:13 The alarm clock is actually set for a quarter past six, but it's a couple of minutes fast at the moment and I haven't bother to reset it. I get a moment's grace where a purplish light comes on and the volume of the music on the iPod gradually ramps up, and I usually manage to switch it off with the remote control before it gets too loud.
• 06:20 Downstairs and open the door into the utility room to be greeted by three hungry cats and a rumpled looking dog. The dog decides he wants to go out into the back garden for a wee, and while he is out I dole out a can of food between the cats.
• 06:25 Put the kettle on for a cup of tea and switch the breakfast tv news on in time to catch the local weather and travel. Let the dog back in. Take my sandwich box out of the fridge and put it in my work bag. I usually have a wrap with leaf salad and savoury cheese filling, made the night before
• 06:30 Run a sink full of hot water to wash up the cat bowls and put down a bit of dried food for second breakfasts. Daisy gets first dibs, then Frank and finally Doris before they disperse to wherever they have chosen to sleep for the day.
• 06:31 Move Doris off of my chair by the radiator in the kitchen
• 06:32 Make a pot of tea and leave it to brew while I eat a bowl of muesli and drink a glass of grapefruit juice to wash down a cod liver oil capsule.
• 06:35 Turn the telly off when the sports news comes on and wash up the cat bowls
• 06:37 Pour two cups of tea to take upstairs
• 06:45 Drink my tea and read overnight twitter and blog updates, then play my turns of Words with Friends, Carcassonne and Disc Drivin'
• 06:59 Switch off notifications and wifi on the phone and then put it into airplane mode
• 07:00 Get in the shower for morning ablutions and other necessaries
• 07:10 Towel dry, get dressed and put phone in shirt pocket
• 07:15 Get coat, keys and work bag. Scrape ice off of the car.
• 07:20 Hit the road, listening to podcasts and audioboos on a playlist
• 07:40 About fifteen miles into the journey, hit the queue of traffic at Wooley Edge services and crawl for the remaining fifteen miles to Leeds. When the podcasts are finished, switch over to the audiobook menu. I'm currently listening to The Fort by Bernard Cornwell - a rousing tale of stout hearted Scotsmen and rebellious colonials in the American War of Independence.
• 08:20 Depending on traffic, arrive at the office in time to get a parking spot.
• 08:25 First coffee of the day while the laptop wheezes into life.

Haikusday

A stranger returns
Bringing trouble in his wake
Tale of the Midlands

The new car rewards
A light touch on the pedal
Driving gamified

Time traveling dinos
Make surprisingly gruesome
Saturday viewing

Clear skies, distant clouds
The temperature drops again
Turn the heating up

Racing Cars

Just a quick update today - I've just driven home in my new car and I'm hugely impressed. It's a Toyota Auris, which is a slightly smaller version of the Prius but with the same hybrid engine. It's quiet, comfortable to drive, does 65MPG and has a usb interface for my iPhone.

The coolest feature is that it monitors your driving for eco efficiency during your journey, and when you switch off it gives you a rating. On my trip home tonight I earned an excellent - BEST!

Rock Band 3

After discovering that 'A Day to Remember' had four new songs up on the Rock Band Network, we just had to download them and have an impromptu session to try them out. I must admit that this screamo stuff is slowly growing on me (shhh, don't tell anybody I said that). I enjoyed playing all of the tracks on guitar, particularly "I'm Made of Wax Larry, What Are You Made Of?".

I had a few points left burning a hole in my metaphorical xbox live marketplace pocket, so I indulged my inner goth and also downloaded 'She Sells Sanctuary' by the Cult, and managed to 100% it on guitar. Aces!

Staring at the Sun

• Meet Badger Girl - the Baby Honey Badger! ZooBorns
• So you found something cool on the Internet ... (H/T IncurableHippie!)
• The Case of the Missing Cigarettes A Stalinist approach to the evils of tobacco
• Yahoo!locaust Vast swathes of the digital landscape are under threat
• Meditating cats balance tangerines Om (nom nom)
• At last - the ketchup robot!
• Universe captured in mind-boggling detail
• The 6 Most Disastrous Attempts at Internet Damage Control (h/t Rachel!)
• Do Giraffes Float? Enquiring minds need to know
• You be the Judge Will you give them a slap on the wrist or bang them up for twenty years?
• A Total Eclipse at the End of the World
• Extreme Planet Makeover Intelligently designing a planet isn't as easy as it looks

Gay Angels

This is my Saturday night chill out selection, and I have to say that it sounds wonderful through the sound system. I thought that I was hearing a distant rumble of thunder at one point, but it is the sound of breath on the microphone. Stunning, haunting and intimate.

Today has been hard work, but productive. Into Leeds for a day long tutorial covering units 5, 6 and 7 of M255 with a chance to review some old TMA questions as well. There were only seven of us there, which surprised me because the OU tutorial sessions are part of what you pay for on the course and are always useful to me. The morning session ran from half past ten till half past twelve, when I nipped down to meet Jan in the coffee bar for lunch. Unfortunately there was a perfectly hee-yuge queue and only one chap serving (very slowly), and no hot food either, so I didn't get the fish and chips that I had been looking forward to, or even a sandwich, and had to make do with a pack of crisps and a chocolate bar from the vending machine. Grumph.

Back upstairs after half an hour for another two hour session crammed with good stuff, and I ended up chatting to the tutor after for a bit. We bemoaned the stated of higher education with the looming tuition fee rises and agreed that education should be about more than getting a bit of paper to qualify you for a job. I would recommend the OU as a good way of broadening your mind, no matter what age you are.

Home again to an excited dog, and I zonked out for much needed half hour nap, joined as usual by Frank the cat who takes a special delight in curling by my side while I snooze.

Now we have chicken roasting in the oven, a glass of Greene King IPA and Primeval on the telly. Life is good.

Under cover of the night

Of scams and ice falls

Plants vs Zombies (Mac/Os)

I finished the adventure mode last weekend with no problems (hardly surprising after having completed it several times on the iPhone). My reward for this achievement was unlocking a whole host of new goodies including mini-games, puzzle mode, survival mode and the Zen garden. Hurrah!

I've just dabbled with the puzzle mode - the vase smashing is good fun and requires a bit of thought, and the I, Zombie mode turns the whole concept on its head with sending zombies to chomp flowers. The survival mode is a good challenge, and I managed to last seven waves on the daylight hard setting last night. I have a plan for the hard night time pond level involving building a row of cattails all the way across the screen to shoot the balloon zombies with star fruits and gloom shrooms along the sides for heavy fire power.

The Zen garden is a wonderful change of pace, and is really just an excuse to potter around, watering and feeding plants and listening to relaxing music. It's also a nice money spinner to earn cash to spend in Crazy Dave's shop.

All I can say is that it's a good job that Popcap games don't deal crack ... :-)

The Light Dies Down on Broadway

I'm definitely at a low ebb at the moment. I was awake for a couple of hours in the night with a grumbling stomach upset and only managed an hour and a half more kip before the alarm went off.

The drive in was similarly rubbish again, and looks like being so for the next couple of months with the road works in situ. It is the wrong time of year to be doing it, with the limited light and bad weather, and I've never actually seen anybody working on it when I've been past.

Apologies for moaning, but at least two more positive things to report. My boss is going to see if he can wangle me some money towards my OU course as work related training which will be mice as I have already paid for it and budgeted the money. Secondly, number one daughter called after avoiding me for several days after I nagged her about sorting out her CV for her work placement next year. She's very much the sort of person who deals with important things by ignoring them and hoping they go away, but hopefully she is now sorting it out.

Haikusday

Scandal in Ambridge
Is Ian the secret father
Of Helen's baby?

Absolute zero
To hotter than the sun's heart
What is one degree?

Java errors will
Be trapped if you always try
to catch exceptions

Yearly appraisal
Objectives met and surpassed
No cash for pay rise

Busy day at work
Time for the Zen garden in
Plants versus Zombies

Burma Shave

Monday morning. Cold, wet and dark. The only saving grace was that, at two degrees, it wasn't quite cold enough for ice to need scraping off of the windscreen. The traffic was bad as usual - I left my house at twenty past seven and only just managed to nab the last space in the car park at twenty to nine. This is for a journey that should take just over half an hour in optimal conditions. At least the roads were a bit better on the way home and the temperature had perked up to a toasty seven degrees.

In good news, the HMRC have sent me a refund of just over £80 for a tax overpayment and my new car should be delivered next week. I've gone for the Toyota Auris this time which is the UK made Auris with the hybrid gubbins out of the Prius. Apparently it's even lower emissions and better economy than the Prius, with the added eco benefit of not having to be shipped from Japan. Which is nice, especially as petrol is nudging £1.30 a litre.

It's the second week back at work and the holidays are now a distant memory. I'm feeling very run down and tired again, and if I try to talk for more than a couple of minutes my voice degenerates into a Tom Waits style croak (as you can probably tell if you've listened to any of my recent Audioboos). I've also noticed that when I type things I am missing out words, and then not noticing I have missed them until after I have posted the article or sent the email. I suspect that my usual typing speed has decreased as well. Hmmm. Not good.

In OU news, I have finished Unit 8 on exception handling and I've made in roads into Unit 9 on arrays and data handling. This puts me comfortably ahead by about a month, and I'll be able to make a start on TMA 03 before I even have to submish TMA 02.

Sunday Links

• I just checked… Bebe McSkunkerson!
• How to make a decent cuppa Hitch explains all
• Clap Your Hands to this Tune Nathan Jay's amazing new video!
• Top Mashups of 2010
• 101 Pictures of people from 1 to 101
• The worst websites ever…. My eyes!
• Data transfer rates Visualised
• Magnificent specimens Of facial hair. (check out the beards gallery in the portfolio section)
• Nasty case of writer's block creates the most brilliant scientific paper ever
• ZOMG SCIENCE! Does what is says on the tin
• Wormworldsaga Inriguing and beautifully drawn web comic
• Papercraft Andy Warhol
• How to have a post apocalypse themed new year's day party

The Bourne Ultimatum

I think we must be relative latecomers to the world of amnesiac super assassin Jason Bourne - we only got around to watching the first two films in the trilogy before xmas after they had been on the pvr box for ages, and now we've just watched the third film on a blu ray disc from Lovefilm.

It's very much a continuation of the story, kicking off where the previous one finished. It's full of flashbacks and references to earlier events, so you really do need to have seen the other films to make sense of it. It's confusing enough with a moles and traitors and secret black-ops factions, and a plot line that flits from Moscow to Paris to London to Tangiers and probably other points in between, finally ending up in New York like some sort of demented world tour. It's nice to see European locations being used effectively in an action block buster, and Paul Greengrass's direction just about stays on the right side of hyper-kinetic.

It was also nice to see Paddy Considine in a notable supporting role as an investigative journalist trying to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of everything. Mat Damon turns in his usual stony faced performance as the eponymous Bourne and he performs an impressive number of his own stunts including some bone crunching fight scenes.

All in all, it's complete tosh with a number of gaping plot holes if you think about it for more than a few seconds, but fortunately the non-stop action doesn't afford you that opportunity to worry too much. We did have to pause a few times to work out what was going on, and who was double crossing who, but that's one of the benefits of watching at home.

Weighing the uber-paranoid story against the stylish action, it's actually a perfectly fine way to spend a Saturday night in front of the telly, I would say. Worth a watch.

Talk to da pawz!

Games diary

It's been a while since I did one of these, so I thought I would have a bit of a catch up. Over the xmas period I managed to snarf up a huge number of iphone games that were either free or on sale, as well as Plants vs Zombies on Steam on my Macbook. Combined with Fable III on xbox, this has led to something of a games glut.

On iPhone I think that I will continue with my usual online trio of Words with Friends (or Words with Nerds as Grace Dent on Twitter has renamed it), Carcassonne and Disc Drivin' but I have a choice for a longer term game and I am currently torn between Game Dev Story, Mirror's Edge and Broken Sword. Hmmmm. Probably be Game Dev Story, I think.

Plant's vs Zombies is as enjoyable as ever on the macbook, although clicking with the trackpad to collect falling suns is not quite as easy as the touch screen interface on the iPhone. My aim is to unlock the zen garden mode that was missing from the iPhone version, and I am already onto the night time levels, so that is achievable.

On the xbox my resolution is to finish Fable III before starting on Assassins Creed:Brotherhood. I am about fifteen hours in so far, and I have just reached the plot twist bit. It's not quite the same change in tone as the Spire was in Fable II, but it's pretty good nonetheless.

In other xbox news, we finished the last of the road challenges so we are now going back and gold starring the ones that we only have silver on, to earn the title of living legends. Good times!

Friday Boo

Hanging on the telephone

I've had just three days in the office this week and I'm already knackered. It's a good job I'm working at home tomorrow as there is snow forecast for the middle of the day which will make rush hour ... interesting.

It's been a frustrating day today. I was due to do a remote upgrade on a customer site today and I put in a request to their IT department to copy the files from our FTP server onto their network as we have no way to do it via the locked down citrix connection that we have. It took an entire morning of chasing via phone and email to get them to carry out a five minute job, and led to the afternoon a lot more fraught with trying to get everything completed before five o'clock. Grrrr and indeed aargh.

The commuting is also slow and miserable in the dark and the wet too, but at least I have now caught up with a whole bunch of boos and podcasts and I will get around to booing myself tomorrow at some point.

No OU work today, but I'll be able to get some done tomorrow at lunch time. Right, time for a game of Plants vs Zombies which I bought from Steam in the sale the other day.

Blasphemous Rumours

Blasphemy (n)
1. Profane talk
2. An instance of this

Profane
1. Treat (a sacred thing) with irreverence or disregard
2. Violate or pollute (what is entitled to respect)

Blasphemy is a funny old thing.

We no longer have a specific offence of blasphemy in the UK, although we do have the broader and more nebulous idea of incitement to religious hatred law. This requires an intent to incite hatred against a person or group of people based on their religious beliefs (or lack of them). The intent clause was not originally in the act, which in effect would have made the Bible and the Qur'an illegal because of the language used against non-believers.

I have no problem with laws that protect people from hatred.

Everybody has a right to quietly get on with their lives, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same. Obviously in a modern society where we live crowded together in urban environments this requires a modicum of politeness, neighbourly give and take and sensible compromise. As long as everybody follows the golden rule of do as you would be done by, then we will all get along fine.

I do have a problem with laws that give abstract ideas special protection.

In Pakistan the blasphemy laws have been used in vindictive ways, to persecute minorities or with malicious intent against rivals. Even where no offense has been proved, an accusation of blasphemy has been enough to see people killed by vengeful mobs or dying in unexplained circumstances whilst in police custody.

Now Punjabi governor Salman Taseer has been shot dead by one of his own bodyguards on Tuesday for supporting fairly modest reforms of the blasphemy law. Some religious groups are even going so far as to say that "anyone who expressed sympathy over the death of a blasphemer was also committing blasphemy" (and presumably also deserves shooting). Lovely people.

What no one will explain is why Jehovah or Allah or whichever deity it may concern requires any sort of protection. Judging by the old testament, there was no shortage of smiting of non believers, and even in the new testament two followers of the apostles were struck dead for not putting all of their money into the communal pot (funny how the American evangelists skip over this chapter).

By insisting on laws to protect the delicate feelings of their deity, the believers are saying that their god, much like our own dear Queen, is not allowed to answer back and defend themselves against criticism. However, they can't point to any passage in their holy texts where their god has said 'enough with the smiting, I'm retiring from actively intervening, and I expect you to shoot anyone who blasphemes against me'.

Now the Pakistani government is shuffling its feet and refusing to back the reforms, and there do not appear to be any moderate believers saying that shooting people over imagined slights is a bad thing.

To say that a belief is worthy of more respect than a human life is the most offensive thing that I can imagine. All blasphemy laws must be abolished, as a fundamental tenet of human rights.

If anybody would like to accuse me of blasphemy, then go right ahead, just so long as I can cross examine god as the injured party in court ...

Haikusday

Sixty years of soap
An everyday story
Ends in tragedy

From fourth on the bill
To nation's favourite comics
Eric and Ernie

Collings and Herrin
In thoughtful mood, consider
Three years of podcasts

Awake in the night
Looking at the alarm clock
Waiting for the dawn

Solar eclipse
Celestial majesty
Occluded by clouds

The Last One Standing

The last day of the holidays and it seems that we are back to cold and dry weather again, which bodes well for catching sight of the eclipse tomorrow morning.

After the usual morning potter and dog walk I got stuck into the last bit of my M255 TMA and finished it off in under two hours, ending up with frogs randomly jumping around on a pond trying to land on the centre lily pad. The coding side of Java is starting to make sense now, particularly the use of overriding methods to do useful things. I'm going to wait until after the next tutorial on the 15th before submishing it, as per my usual plan. On to Unit 8 tomorrow, with stuff on error handling.

The afternoon was taken up with my last nap of the hols, accompanied as usual by Frank the cat, and another walk in the woods as dusk and the temperature fell rather quickly. There was still a reasonable amount of light in the sky at twenty to five, so it won't be too much longer that I have to leave the office in the dark at the end of the working day.

Right, time for Stargazing live on BBC2 ...

Stewart Lee : Nineties Comedian

I almost hesitate to call this a stand-up comedy dvd. True, the opera director Stewart Lee does indeed stand up for a hour and quarter, and the end result is undoubtedly very funny indeed, but there are very few jokes per se (apart from particular joke, especially written so that it could not be stolen by squeaky voiced mainstream comic Joe Pasquale).

Instead, Lee uses the time to take the audience on a journey into some very dark places indeed. He describes his health problems that lead to an embarrassing endoscopy examination that touches upon his status as a 'well known comedian'. He describes the surreal experience of waking up on the morning of the 7/7 bombings in London to find his email in box full of concerned messages from friends round the world and moves to the point where he is almost nostalgic for 'the gentlemen bombers of the IRA ... proper British terrorists (even if they didn't want to be British)'. He muses on the nature of comedy and the role of the clown to comment and provoke from within a privileged circle,

The story closes with Lee at his lowest point - suffering from health problems, being at the focus of media storm of hate mail and accusations of blasphemy as co-author of Jerry Springer - the Opera, and a visit home to his mother to escape from the pressure. On a drunken walk home from the pub he encounters the heavenly presence of Jesus and describes the meeting in ways that are simultaneously obscenely biological, blasphemous (in the legal sense of the word) and strangely moving. At times he turns his back on the audience and leaves the stage, and at another point he lowers the microphone to shout whilst we struggle to hear what he is saying. He deliberately alienates the audience and then brings them back on board, and makes us all complicit in his conclusions.

It is powerful stuff, but I suspect that the people who would most benefit from seeing it are the least likely to pick up this DVD from Go Faster Stripe. The rest of you should watch it anyway.

Sunday Links

• Zoo Basel Welcomes Miniature Piglets Piggles on ZooBorns
• 25 of the Scariest Science Experiments Ever Conducted
• Ten Amazingly Rude Optical Illusions
• Civil War message opened, decoded: No help coming I studied the famously tricky Vigenere cipher as part of my last OU course. If anybody wants to know the secret, just let me know ... :-)
• Vietnam's Mammoth Cavern A cave big enough to fit in a skyscraper and a jungle. Wowzers!
• 2000 Vs. 2010: How the world has changed
• HaïkuLeaks Wikileaks contains / Unexpected poetry / Serendipity
• Achieve your New Year’s Resolutions! in 59 Seconds
• One Million Galaxies
• Detroit in ruins Urban decay in the Motor City - no wonder they picked it as the location for 'The Walking Dead'
  

Blood on the Rooftops

One of the very first groups that I stumbled across on the internet back in the day was uk.media.radio.archers (aka UMRA), which described itself as a group for the sort of people who might listen to the Archers. For the benefit of Nancy, The Archers is a daily, 15 minute soap opera that is, to quote the original tagline, 'an everyday story of country folk'.

I haven't listened for a while, and I've drifted away from UMRA to a certain extent (although I still keep in touch with various UMRATS through Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal - ~waves~ at Fenny, Rosie, Niles et al). Much like Al Pacino in the Godfather, just when I thought I was out tonight's special 60th anniversary double episode dragged me back in.

I still recognised the voices of Nigel, Lizzie, Ruth, David, Pat, Tony and Tom, and I followed the portentous storyline with a sense of impending doom. My Casualty-fu was in effect and I called Helen's pre-eclampsia before Amy did. We were teased with many possibilities for disaster before the final scene on the icy, windswept rooftops of Lower Loxley. In the words of Ruth - oooooh nooooh!

I'm off to iTunes to resubscribe to the podcast - Ambridge here I come!

Keyboard Cat is Not Doing Requests

Disappointment of the Year

In the dying days of the last Labour government, I wrote to my MP expressing my concerns about the Digital Economy Act and in particular the way it was being rushed through parliament without any real debate or oversight. She replied with a lofty dismissal that waved away the points that I had made with an air of 'we know best'. This attitude, combined with years of increasingly authoritarian policies including ID cards, detention without trial and repressive policing in the name of anti terror laws made it impossible for me to vote Labour in the election.

I chose the Lib Dems with an air of optimism that their priorities - for science funding, education and civil liberties - matched my own. I thought that in a hung parliament the Lib Dems would have a real shot at influencing politics for the better. It seems I was wrong. David Cameron has effectively used Nick Clegg as a human shield whilst he has embarked on a ruthless series of cuts that seem anything but fair whilst the richest in the country are still getting richer (and paying less tax).

Wither politics? Yes, it might. All I know is the Britain of 2011 is a colder, more divided and less hopeful place than it was a year ago.

Gig of the Year

I didn't get out all that much in 2010 for one reason and another, but there were several events that I really enjoyed. The 'Love Music, Hate Racism' event in Barnsley was one such where even the rain couldn't dampen the enthusiasm for seeing a host of different bands on stage including such names as 'The Blackout' and 'Reverend and the Makers'. The Tramlines festival was another highlight, which had the air of something like Glastonbury but on the streets of Sheffield and all for free. Wonderful.

I'll include comedy gigs on this list too, with a trip into London to see 'As It Occurs to Me' as well as Richard Herring on his own with his 'Hitler Moustache'. The winner in this category though was seeing Sarah Millican performing in the back room at the Lescar. She is deservedly on the cusp of being very famous indeed, and it is rare that you get to somebody of that caliber playing a small standup gig.

If I made resolutions, then the one that I would choose would be to see more live gigs in 2011. Watch this space.

Movie of the Year

I don't think that we went to the cinema once in 2010, that I can recall. I think I commented on one of Will's boos that the cinema is expensive (particularly when you start buying popcorn, cola and sweets), noisy (with people chatting and texting), crowded and saturated with advertising. You can't enjoy a beer with your film and you can't pause it halfway through to go to the loo (an important consideration for those of us of advancing years). Anyhoo, we now have a telly of sufficient size coupled with an audio system with enough oomph to render cinema trips more or less redundant.

This was the year that we discovered the oeuvre of Shane Meadows and happily worked through most of his back catalogue including the recent 'Le Donk and Scor-zay-ze', last year's 'Somers Town' and his debut 'A Room for Romeo Brass'. The best of the bunch was the thriller 'Dead Man's Shoes' which gripped me from start to finish, with a performance from lead actor Paddy Considine that would have won an Oscar in a Hollywood movie.

Telly of the Year

Some real gems in 2010, including the super debut of Matt Smith in Doctor Who and the wonderfully gruesome zombie apocalypse of Walking Dead. 'Any Human Heart' was a strong contender for my favourite telly, with Jim Broadbent on top form, but it was pipped at the post by the searing drama of This is England - 86.

This series continued the story of Shane Meadows' earlier film 'This is England', but expanded the focus from the skinhead culture to give a perspective of life on the crumbling council estates of the mid 80s. This is a world apart from the shoulder-pads and yuppies of 'Ashes to Ashes', but despite the harrowing events portrayed the final conclusion is one of surprising hope.

Book of the Year

My count of books read in 2010 finished at 25 - well down on my book a week resolution of 2009, but that is mainly due to the large amount of academic reading that I did instead. I revisited some old favourites and tried some new authors, but the standout for me was One Day by David Nicholls.

The book opens with two young people - Emma and Dexter - meeting on the last night of University as they graduate and prepare to embark on their adult lives. Their paths intersect over the next twenty years or so, and the book takes a snapshot view of their lives and relationships on the same day each year.

It is much a novel of the times from the mid 80s through to the early 2000s, charting the changing mores and the political landscapes of Britain through a turbulent couple of decades. Perhaps it is because it so perfectly evoked the passing of the times that I lived through, that the novel appealed to me so much.

I came to it without knowing anything of the plot, other than the basic premise, and I would recommend that you approach it similarly.