A diary of nothing happening

Things I planned to bring to Australia but didn't

2009-10-28T09:25:44Z

Razor: AU$3.95
Stills camera: AU$9.95
Sun hat: AU$4.99
Kids: Priceless!

In Australia

2009-10-23T17:13:20Z

Well, we've arrived safely in Brisbane. Our first holiday without the kids for about 20 years (we expect the house to be perfect when we get back, kids!) so we've decided it's a second honeymoon. At the moment we're hanging around the airport terminal, , probably smelling worse than a dingo's dunny after the 29 hour journey from home, waiting for the car hire desks open in about 3 hours time. No point checking into a local motel for just three or four hours, so Antitig is sleeping on a sofa in the arrivals lounge, and I will be occupting another one when I've finished typing this. How romantic!

I have to hand it to Emirates, their in-flight entertainment is great! Thousands of films, TV programmes and CD's to choose from -- as well as listening to Florence and The Machine, and Leonard Cohen, I was able to work my way through the Pink Floyd back-catalog -- I got from Piper at the Gates of Dawn all the way up to Wish You Were Here, as well as catching up on the film Prince Caspian, three episodes of Outnumbered, Death Note 2 (a rather well-plotted and visually great live-action manga adaptation) and a whole pile of other stuff. I think that will do for videos for a while.

Telephone conversation

2009-07-30T19:57:33Z

Voice: Hello, could I speak to Eva please?
Me: She's in Hong Kong at the moment. Can I help or take a message?
Voice: Could she do a night shift tonight? Even if she has to be a bit late...
Me: ???

Sleeping on Sofa

2009-07-19T15:11:31Z

Even when my wife is away (Hong Kong, since you ask) I can still end up sleeping on the sofa!

I repainted the stairs. The paint tin said "touch dry in one hour". The paint tin lied. So I was trapped downstairs.

At least it's a comfy sofa.

Poet Laureate

2009-05-01T11:51:44Z

Hurrah! We are back to having a poet laureate whose work I like. I loved Ted Hughes' poetry, but could never find anything to like in Andrew Motion's.

Snow

2009-02-02T01:45:48Z

The snowfall today has made everything so picturesque that I want to put up a tree and Christmas decorations! Maybe we should celebrate Candlemas instead of Christmas -- the weather is usually so much more Christmassy then!

Bob, the rabbit of the subgenius

2008-11-02T19:11:29Z

Well, Bob the Rescue Rabbit came to live with us just over a week ago. We put him in the run, right up against Jessica's hutch. They sniffed at each other through the bars, then Bob went on to explore the rest of the run. Jess, though, did a perfect reproduction of the mirror scene from the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup", running up and down the hutch keeping exactly in line with Bob (even when Jess went into the closed-off part of the hutch).

Jess has never been entirely comfortable around humans, although she's getting better. Bob, on the other hand, seems to have been a house-rabbit (he's a rescued stray). He's toilet-trained and more than happy to be picked up and fussed. He turns out to be a very licky rabbit, licking our hands and feet whenever he gets the chance. We've given him a mineral lick in the hutch, but he prefers our hands and feet.

For a week we swapped them around between the run, the indoor hutch and the outdoor hutch, so they got used to each others' smell, then introduced them to each other in our lounge. Bob
is only half Jessica's size, but seems to be solid muscle (and as a rescued stray can clearly look after himself), whereas Jess is more floppy. He kept sniffing at Jess, who would then chase him away. Eventually, fed up with being chased he settled on my lap (so he sees humans as safe havens -- his previous owners must have been really good with him). They didn't actually fight, so we put them in the indoor hutch overnight. After some aggressive posturing from Jess and a certain amount of running around they settled at opposite ends of the hutch. By yesterday, though, Jess had started grooming Bob, and they were sleeping snuggled against each other, so they seem to have made friends.

Then, disaster. Yesterday evening, Jane went to bring them in from the run, and found that she'd left the latch open on the door, and they'd both escaped. Jess was found quickly enough, but no sign of Bob. After an age of hunting around the garden with flashlights and going around all our neighbours, we eventually gave Bob up for lost and came in. I left the garden light on, in the hope of deterring the many cats and foxes we have here.

This morning I was up at first light to start the search, only to find that Jane had already been searching before dawn, and had come in and fallen asleep on the sofa. But when I went out to the back of the house, there was Bob, trying to work out how to open the French windows to get back into the indoor hutch! When we opened the windows he ran away, but only to the outdoor hutch, which he happily hopped into. So the rabbit family is complete again.

I suspect Jess thinks we're daft, though. Earlier today we saw him trying to bully Bob, but when Eva went out with some food he switched instantly to grooming. Not that Jess completely gets away with the bullying. Jess used to push Thumper off the water bottle when she wanted a drink, and Thumper would put up with it. Bob doesn't: he pushes back. Proper hard case is our Bob, when he needs to be!

Exam and Beer

2008-10-15T17:36:03Z

Well, that's the E303 exam out of the way. Three parts with roughly equal weighting. Part A easier than I expected, part B as I expected and part C harder than I expected, so it looks as if I'll be getting the grade I deserve, although that's probably not the grade I would like. On the way home I started reading Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" because I wanted to, not because it was set as part of a course!

Meanwhile, what am I to do with all this beer? The CAMRA beer club sent me two beers -- eight bottles -- in the last batch that it turns out don't meet the club's strict criteria, so they've sent me another eight bottles than do meet the criteria plus two more as an apology, and I get to keep the original eight. And I've still got a few cans of ordinary stuff left over from a party ages ago. At the moment it's hard to get into the kitchen for beer. Anybody fancy popping over for a drink?

digitig @ 2008-10-08T16:29:00

2008-10-08T15:33:56Z

I found another box of vinyl albums in a seldom-visited cupboard in the lumber room last night, so I've got them ripping in the background whilst I work. I'd forgotten just how Pink-Floyd-esque Wally's "Valley Gardens" was.

Sadly, one of our rabbits -- Thumper -- died last night. He was obviously unwell when we were moving him from the run to the hutch last night, so we brought him into the house. He seemed to liven up a little bit, but died in the night.

Temptation...

2008-06-11T17:02:33Z

Whenever I do an air traffic safety case or plan, I always have to include a list of abbreviations, and have to say (again!) that "TMA" stands for "Terminal Manoevering Area".

One day (probably just before I retire) I swear I'm going to put "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly" in the abbreviations list, and see whether anybody notices...

I've done an AJ

2007-12-22T13:04:48Z

Like this

I'm posting this from my new Eee PC, which has turned up earlier than I expected, so I now have a real Linux PC, albeit in miniature.

All of the publicity material only mentioned the office and internet appications, but I'm pleased that GCC, Python, Perl and Ruby come pre-installed, as does Vim but not emacs or the Gimp. Nothing I couldn't add, of course, but I need to be picky with only a total of 4Gb disk space (ok, now it's 6Gb because I've added an SD card).

It was also really easy to integrate it with the Windows XP wifi network at home, and to connect to network printers, which was a pleasant surprise -- my past experience of Linux and wifi has not been good. It does seem to worthwhile activating the undocumented "advanced mode" which gives a standard KDE desktop.

The keyboard needs a very positive push on the keys, so I'm tending to miss some letters, and I have to do a lot of scrolling on the 7" screen, but as I see it as positioned as an overgrown PDA rather than a cut-down computer it's all looking good.

E301 result

2007-12-20T21:08:58Z

I see my E301 result is on my OU Student Home page -- distinction. Yay!

Now, what to do next...

Comics

2007-11-19T11:57:17Z

Prompted by tamnonlinear mentioning it, I revisited Questionable Content and spent the weekend reading the strip from beginning to end, over 1000 strips. Huge fun, though a bit worrying because no matter how cruel Jeph is to his characters they still seem to be having a better sex life than me. But then, Jeph draws that unusual world in which everybody is young and hot and there are no middle-aged or elderly people (even the characters' parents are as young and hot as their offspring -- what's the matter, Jeph? Wrinkles use too much ink?) Tweep, now sadly dormant, did that side of things so much better. And hey, how come the girls always have their panties on for the post-coital cuddle? Do they all do it with their panties on? Or do they slip them back on as soon as they finish? Is this an American thing? Or is it just that Jeph likes to draw hot chicks as close to naked as he can get away with? Well, I suppose I would too if I could draw. Still lots of good laughs in there.

Writer's Block: My Personal Style

2007-10-23T15:10:09Z

How would you describe your personal style?

View 500 Answers

More calculated that it looks. For work I have to wear a jacket and tie, but if I'm too smart then people will not expect me to know about technical subjects -- I'd look too much like an admin type angling for promotion. So the tie has to be just a /bit/ faded, the jacket just a /bit/ crumpled; not so much that I look scruffy, but enough to look as if I'm not really trying, as if I'm not really that bothered.

Casual is more difficult, because I don't know what I am trying to achieve. I can be so many different people that the attempt to project all of them probably ends up rather confused. Probably the most obvious thing about my clothes is that I've lost weight so most of them are baggy on me. Am I too old to pull off a hip-hop style?

Annoying thing

2007-10-15T22:31:06Z

Just been listening again to "Hocus Pocus" by Focus. Has anybody else noticed the similarity between Thijs val Leer's middle vocal break and the Crazy Frog?

ECA

2007-10-01T21:27:42Z

Well, I sent off my end of course assessment (a sort of project in lieu of an exam) this morning. I'm now just outside Maastricht on business and am shattered.

College

2007-08-14T22:22:25Z

Well, I've got my result back for my latest college assignment (a close reading of a text of my choice; I chose the first paragraph of "Lake Wobegon Days") -- 96%. And it counts as two assignments in my overall grade. "Awesome research" according to my tutor. By my calculations that means I don't need to submit my final assignment (though I expect will anyway) and my final grade will be what I get on the end of course assessment (a project that replaces the exam). Woot!

Wii!

2007-05-25T13:25:32Z

Yay! Finally managed to get a Nintendo Wii -- by staking out a local store when the delivery was due. But I'll probably have to hide it for a couple of weeks, because microtig has exams and I don't want her to be distracted.

Essay Result

2007-05-22T12:48:44Z

Well, I got 89% on that tricky Bakhtin essay -- I'd have got more if I'd given more examples. Still, if I can average over 85% it's a distinction, so that will do! "You show an excellent grasp of the ideas under discussion and are not afraid to engage critically with them". I'm rather pleased with that.

For myself and everyone with a quiet blog

2007-05-20T00:40:10Z

This.

Sheesh, that was a tough one

2007-05-11T21:24:12Z

Just submitted my latest university assignment, on Bakhtin's concept of dialogality. One girl in my tutorial is Russian, and she tried reading Bakhtin in the original -- it seems he's just as unintelligible there, it's not the translators' fault. Still, I've managed to submit something, I just wish I understood it!

For the avoidance of doubt

2007-04-10T13:48:43Z

It's the first time I've seen usage instructions on one of these!

Blogged with Flock

Sweeps' Festival

2006-05-02T10:26:42Z

Well, a fun bank holiday weekend, most of it at the Sweeps' Festival in Rochester. Lots of good folk music, including Swarbs Lazarus and Fairport Convention. I did feel that the best of the Fairport set was the classic material -- Tam Lin, Crazy Man Michael, Matty Groves, Meet on the Ledge (their encore), but maybe that's just familiarity. In the 70's we used to say that Fairport Convention was Dave Swarbrick and whoever turned up, which would mean that Swarbs Lazarus was the real Fairport Convention, of course.

Other interesting bands were Les Chiens D'Mer (French thrash-folk, a bit Pogues-ish), Geyers (a German band playing lots of Renaissance stuff on odd instruments) and Moveable Feast, a fun world/fusion band.

The only downside was one of the worst Indian meals I've ever had, at The Two Cities in Rochester High Street. It had lots of good reviews and awards in the window, but it took over 45 minutes for our food to arrive, and when it did my biriani was cold and tasted metallic. Antitig reckons that her rubbery rice was because it was microwaved. One to avoid in future.

I got myself an anglo concertina dirt-cheap. It's rubbish, but good enough for me to find out whether I can learn the instrument (and cheap enough that I can open it up and experiment on it).

Managed to get my OU assignment in on time

2006-01-17T00:39:36Z

Although it meant working until 3am on Friday and Saturday. I'm pleased with this essay, which is worrying -- I though the last two were poor but I got good marks.

Microtig went to audition for a part in the next Harry Potter film at the weekend, along with all the other 13-15 year-old girls in the South East of England. I don't think she got it!

I was the only one in the office today, so I wired my iPod through the computer speakers and listened to music while I worked. I just had to remember to turn it off when I answered the phone, because it struck me that greeting callers with Rage Against the Machine shouting "F*** you I won't do what you tell me M*****f*****" might not project exactly the professional image my employer is aiming for.

London City

2005-12-22T18:08:23Z

Got back from Maastricht last night, flying from Brussels into London City Airport. It's the first time I've been to London City since it opened (I helped fit out the control tower before it opened). The itenary said that "dinner" was included on the flight. The cheese roll they gave me was labelled "afternoon snack: small".

The steep approach to London City is fun -- the first time I've needed the seat belt; without it I would have slid forwards out of my seat. It was nice to be looking out from under the wings of the aircraft, getting a great view of the evening traffic jam on the M25.

Unfortunately the Northern line was disrupted: northbound trains not running at all, and southbound trains not stopping at London Bridge (where I needed to go) "To avoid unneccesary congestion". I wonder what they consider would be necessary congestion, given that their reason for existing is moving people between stations? The announcement also said that it was just a five minute walk from Bank (where I was) to London Bridge. Whoever said that had clearly never tried to struggle along King William Street at six in the evening pulling a suitcase behind them. Still, I got home ahead of antitig and the kids coming back from minitig's DDAT appointment in Kenilworth.