Monday, May 29, 2006

Time_Shift

It seems that the three days of a Bank Holiday Weekend only occupy the same time as a normal two-day weekend – a sort of musical triplet of three into two. So sometime on Saturday you tell yourself that this is really the equivalent of Friday Night and then before you know it you are half-way through Monday and thinking about remembering to set the alarm for the next day. Where does it all go and who is saving up these extra days that do not really exist? Anyway, we have been on no major expeditions but it has been full and fulfilling, even if some of the fulfilling has been through busman’s holiday type support and some real out-of hours work on (shh – swear word coming up) excel VBA. I personally think that any large company should disable the use if VBA in Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint etc because that just tempts people to use it. I have been on the receiving end of many Excel and Word “improvements” that have just been thrown together and fail all over the place. Some of them just produce results that are plain wrong and no one has noticed. I have probably told you about the time I wrote a summary report of units travelling through a Work-in-Progress system and to show off my O-Level statistics I added the Standard deviation to the output. The shop-floor staff said they had no idea what standard deviation actually meant but that they had a feeling when it was bad and when it was good.

Anyway, these distractions aside, we have been to Southport, down to see the Iron Men of Crosby (Not Marine Football Club) and played with the new scanner. The youngest has probably put away a whole box of chocolate fingers though not all of them went into his mouth. Daughter has tidied her room without asking because the grandparents visited so that Grandma would spend time amongst the pink and fluffy grotto that is the natural environment of the seven-year-old girl these days and always. Much Wallace and Gromit has been watched and repeated … and repeated.

I actually managed to get to the scrap-book, the results of which are below, along with a number of other things you may or may not find interesting.





So you see, I was slightly less sad than the poor sap who spent the extra day tidying his Penguin Shelf – though as you can see I did that too.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Wanted to Hear the B-Side – B-Side – B-Side – B-Side

Next album is decided on I think. Nice to see Green back on the scene. I rushed out and bought Cupid and Psyche ’85 and loved it despite the Rhino-Stopping realisation that the voice on one of the remixes was Gary “Medallion Man” Davies from Wonderful Radio One. Now Scritti Politti cropped up on some giveaway of post punk stuff from then and now with a song someway removed from the slick and dreamy stuff of CS85. Despite my love of this album I never bought anything else and at first I was convinced that the giveaway track had been labelled wrongly. Still, this is the way of great bands – change style and remain ahead.

I think my rant from yesterday that ended with Id and Ego actually should really have been linked to Plato’s Cave and I have the youngest to thank for pointing it out. He decided to fling a book across the room yesterday and chose Rudy Rucker’s Fourth Dimension which I picked up and flicked through where it opened at a description of Plato’s cave. So read the Wikipedia article to get what I really wanted to say – er – I think.

What did we do before Wikipedia?

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Mechanical Avunculogratulation

I didn’t think that would be in the spell-check but I tried it anyway.

Many dreams of loss at the moment. I am sure they all stand for fears about the future rather than for the people they refer to but they are disturbing just the same. I dream of school-days crushes which are knocked back by attraction to more handsome and socially-outgoing classmates. I have to say that some of the people involved I only ever knew at primary school but they seem to have grown up. Maybe it is just a desire to go back and start again. These are indeed strange days and sometimes I almost hope for some catastrophic event to sweep away all the low-level noise and anxiety. My recent ability to compartmentalise all this seems to be flaking at times. As I have said before … I don’t know what I have said before … in the short time between thinking up what I wanted to say and writing that preamble, it vanished from my head which is very worrying. These things make me worry that I am beginning to seize up. Which is rubbish and I know it.

You would think I was living in ancient times with a life-expectancy of about 30 and a horrible lumpy mattress made of straw and weevils. All my hope for a simpler lifestyle really would mean the absence of all the wonderful things that keep life in this country relatively comfortable for almost everyone. Our family life is very simple compared to a lot of people and if everyone lived like we do, I am sure this wonderful economy that keeps us all happy would sputter and die. But then again why does it always have to grow? That way leads to us buying things like the Ronco Olive Pitter or any record by …. Well at the moment almost any record by anyone. Actually I seem to use Olive Pitters as a metaphor for the extremes to which society and economy reach. This is of course completely wrong and ignores the real depth and social colour of what is happening in the world.

Ugh! My coffee has gone cold.

We all like to think we are the most important thing in the world and using some sort of quantum analogy I suppose we actually can be. There is nothing more important than how I feel. This gets me on to the question of how different is the experience of being me compared to my experience of other people. To a mind dropped into a body, complete with a full intelligence of some mechanical kind but no human experiences, what does this feel like? It would seem like you were the centre of the world, the intelligent heart of a machine with the rest of the world as so much fuzzy movement around the edges. The trouble is now that it seems that so many people act like this is really true. Psychopathy must make you feel like this. The rest of us have grown up realising that other people, those other upright sticks of flesh with clever jelly in their heads, don’t like being taken as just things in a world for your pleasure. This must be discussed at a much higher level of detail and intelligence in psychology – Id and Ego anyone? So all this is just irrelevant.

I told a joke I found on Wikipedia after linking from the article about threads (in computer programming). I ended up in the section about Heisenbugs – bugs which disappear or alter their behaviour when examined – which is supposedly related to Heisenburg’s uncertainty principle but in reality (whatever that is) is really the observer effect. This led me to the following joke.

A physicist is stopped in his car by a policeman.

“Do you know how fast you were going Sir?” asks the boy in blue.

“No” replies the physicist “but I do know exactly where I am.”

I thought that was very funny but no one here got it without me explaining it, which is always a bad sign. The problem is that no one I know would get the joke without it being explained and even then not often. Of course I could take this as a sign that everyone else is just either not interested in these things and isn’t that sad. What it actually means is how sad am I for bothering to think that anyone would be interested.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Prullateus akkand Akkariel

Oh for those summers we used to have, when we thought it was always sunny. In reality, they were stuffed with rain and hail and thunderstorms; we just don’t remember them as much as the hot days when we dammed the stream and went home mucky as hell. It all just came back to me as I went for a short walk to get the office disinfectant out of my lungs. All the trees seem to have sprung into leaf in the last week or two and they stretch from here to the edge of the hills. There are a few church spires peeking out over the canopy but it seems to be this place, trees and then moor land. The wind takes everything and gives out a sort of complex white noise, with waves of deeper sounds underpinning the top end swish. This is the kind of temperature I like as well, the average for this time of year, warm enough to go out without a jacket but cool enough to avoid heatstroke. All this is good; it makes me happy to be alive.

And then it rains and I go out into the garden. I could just find space down there under the open door of the garage, to lie down and listen to the rain. Sometimes I find the dry corner at the front of the house, where I can stand without getting wet.

The baby likes to sit on a chair in the porch watching the rain and looking out for cars or people he knows. I suppose we have to stop calling him the baby as it has been possible to have a conversation with him for some time now. I sometimes call him The Boy but that is lifted from someone else’s family accounts. I could make up a name for him other than his real one but that seems wrong as well. He may just have to remain as The Youngest which seems rather sad.

Youngest is very happy at the moment; he now has his own room and stays in it all night which means that out sleep is uninterrupted by the sudden abseil of child from the cot onto his mother. He seems to have no fear of heights which seems to be a throwback to his grandfather who being a bridge engineer will happily hang onto the side of tall structures with no worries at all. I imagine my dad would have been quite happy as one of those steel workers you see in old B&W pictures, sitting cross-legged on a narrow beam with nothing else between him and a sticky end on 5th Avenue below. I do hope we don’t have to chase the child up anything high.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Root Wan Twenny Ate

Listening to She Hangs Brightly by Mazzy Star

A very fragmented list of thoughts today.

Forget The Da Vinci Code. I have been doing my best to persuade my wife that she will not like the film and if she must know the plot, then borrowing the book will be the path of least expense. Not that I need to do much after seeing the reviews; the one in The Guardian being very amusing.

I was cheered by the arrival of an instant message yesterday which simply said “mea culpa”. It wasn’t the fact that someone had admitted to something – I have plenty of things to admit to especially in this line of work – just that I actually know someone who uses the phrase casually expecting his audience to understand it. This sounds pretentious doesn’t it but it heartens me – lets me know that somewhere around there is decency and adherence to some rules of common sense. That link is probably clearer inside my head that I can put down into words but I know what I mean. Yours – Mr. Angry,

It is wet and wild around here today and it reminded me of our October Half-term holidays to Wales. We usually stayed in steep-roofed, clap-board house right on the beach at Llandanwg. It had one long room downstairs which overlooked the beach and the whole sweep of the bay from Barmouth to Bardsey Island. My memory has it raining most of the time we were there, with the wind battering the windows, mixing white noise with that of the surf which was always there. Going to sleep was easy because of this; the sound seemed to fill up the gaps where insomnia-inducing worries usually lurked. The major issue with this house for us children was the lack of television. Our dad used to tease us by saying that there was a television but that it was locked away. We would read or play cards or just look out over the bay from grey morning to dark night when the lights of the far towns flickered like the console of some giant computer. We probably hated it at the time – no TV is a big thing for an eight-year old – but as usual with these memories they transfer easily over the years, from nasty time-filling boredom to nostalgia. A few days in that long room with a pile of good books and good music would be most welcome. Of course we always had the radio, even if we did have to put up with some unsettling differences in the schedules due to being in the principality.

All the things I usually worry about seem to have fragmented into nothing, like that eighties video effect where the picture would suddenly explode into its individual dots which dispersed all over the screen. I cannot get a handle on what any of the fragments refer to and so they don’t seem to worry me any more. The point being I suppose that I don’t really have anything to worry about. As is always the theme, my problem is confidence in what I can do. A new project comes to me and I always think I will not be able to do it. It’s a bit like my telling people that it is difficult for them to break technology so just try pressing buttons and guessing at what something does. They seem afraid that some gadget will bite them or they will bet into trouble for making it go wrong. You need the confidence to try things out. What is the worst that can happen?

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Infinity and Beyond

The small boy has been most concerned to find that McDonalds has vanished from our town. Everything that identified it went within hours of the final Big Mac being served. I have never been a fan but my wife has pointed out that it was the only place locally where you could take kids and not worry too much about shouting and restlessness. This is all on the back of a big redevelopment of the area though some grand plans have been toned down from silver monstrosities to brick coloured monstrosities. The boy obviously thinks that something evil had happened because he has been asserting that there are “cybbymen” in the building which must be the peak of his “DoctyGoo” obsession.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Eardrum Buzz

I have measured out my life in lines of code …. And none of them mean anything. I am working on a new version of something which contains many division-by-zero errors. As division by zero errors, really mean that a result is infinity, can only assume that infinity is a valid concept in the universe of this application. We shall see.

There was an attempt at TS Eliot parody up there. When I first started reading poetry (when I stopped being a prosaic child I suppose) I rapidly moved from Robert Herrick (which I read because it was in To Serve Them All My Days) and onto TS Eliot which I liked because of the wide-ranging themes though you could never say I understood much of it. My own poetic efforts of the time were in the form of long, wide-ranging concealments of the things I saw around me which I thought deserved being recorded. I did a really long thing which filled pages of an A4 notebook and which cannot be said to have anything really concrete in terms of themes. Complete tosh where my ability to use an elegant phrase far outran any thought of meaning or narrative. Then I discovered Sylvia Plath and everything became correspondingly shorter and darker though trying to tease out the links between the seemingly surreal events in Plath’s poems and the real events of her life, made me able to say what I wanted to in a single page. Now of course, I think that Clare Pollard’s clash between rough night-club sexiness and Plathian dirge is the proper way to go. Not having ever been into nightclubs I suspect any attempt at this genre will be marked by embarrassing failure. It is a young person’s game.

None of those long poems are in typed format so unless I feel like typing up all that rubbish, the most you can expect is a scanned page or two.

What can I give you to be going on with?

Grass Cutting

There is a hidden scent across the lawn,
A cloud of something dragging after,
This girl, made to frown and tempt me
In the garden, neatly cut like memories.

And I bore her with a list of lessons,
Dragged from photographs of books,
I carry round inside my head,
To prove my love of ordered days.

Underwater shapes make patterns
On my closed eyes, the garden flattened
Out to black and red and movement
Of this place across my thoughts.

This is a dream of class and love,
Ideas switching silently from kiss
To kiss and sleep in afternoons
With sun or rain and music.
Mit Liebe zu Jack Straw

I was tidying up the bookcase at the weekend, removing the rubbish that just gets stuffed into the gaps over the books so it left just … er … books – well nearly anyway. In an envelope that must have been behind a pile of things for sometime I found some of my old reports from primary school which my dad had given to me the last time we visited. I don’t think us kids actually got to see these, unlike at secondary school where the teachers accepted that we would steam the envelopes open if they were given to us sealed. So these were a surprise. I was slightly annoyed at being called “prosaic”. I would hope that it means factual rather than dull. No – they were probably right.

Every day I drive to here on the North-bound M6. Deciding not to turn off would mean I could carry on and not hit single carriageway roads until after Glasgow – somewhere near Loch Lomond. This is always tempting in a sort of Reggie-Perrin way. To be honest, with the way work is structured, it might actually take a day or two for anyone to notice but that doesn’t mean I am going to try it anytime soon. Before I was married, I once just got in the car and drove all the way to The Kyle of Localsh having seen Michael Palin go there on his first Great Railway Journey. I suppose I should have got the train but there you go. I rained a lot and I never mind that. It looks like rain today which always makes me feel better. I don’t like the migraine-inducing bright light much though sometime a sunny Sunday afternoon in Liverpool with not many people about can be quite atmospheric. Not that Liverpool is ever going to be the same again. Having moved to work up here, we rarely go into Liverpool and when we do it is quite disturbing to see how much changes between visits. The Capital of Culture (Culture of Capital according to some anarchist slogans there are around) has meant that great swathes of the city have been levelled leaving great gaps in the familiar collection of buildings. Liverpool’s great architectural strength was its skyline, one of the most familiar and striking ones in the country. But now, catching up with London and the other big cities, Liverpool us gradually turning in a clone city, same towers, same architecture, all sacrificed for the great bandwagon. I know where the decision to award COC to Liverpool was announced I defended it against the standard anti-scouse abuse that surfaced, thinking that it would mean an extension of some of the great arts festivals that we have had, going back to the days of ten years ago. I realise that some of this rosy view is down to the fact that I don’t get out as much as I used to but capital of culture now seems to mean a year-long version of the Olympic opening ceremony rather than any grass-roots involvement of the people. My pink petticoats are showing aren’t they?

I was quite happy when Will Allsop’s terrible design for the Fourth Grace was thrown out or faded or however it failed to materialise, but the new plans sound just as out-of-keeping with the existing buildings. Of course it takes real effort to make something fit in but it seems that this is effort that architects cannot be bothered to put in these days or more likely they cannot afford it.

All this rant may sound strange in the face of the following enthusiasm for Dan Cruickshank’s programme on Modernism. I love modernism; I love those cubical buildings when they are done well. So much bad architecture from the 60s and 70s was build on the back of modernism but it was done with no thought to the social implications and of course it was done on the cheap. So much which looked good from a distance, became dull and cheap-looking up close because of the failure to finish the things properly which is why something which could have been so useful to creating a good society became the focus of so many of our current ills. I am afraid that lack of effort and finish in everything gives a less-than-successful result every time. All around us we have cheap, plastic versions of the real thing. This why people hark back to real buildings with pitched roofs and gables, all the stuff of traditional design. So while the Nazis turfed out modernism because it was new and fresh and threatened what they saw as traditional values, we reject it out because it is not implemented properly; it is forced in our faces in places where it does not fit and with a lack of rigour that leaves it feeling cheap and nasty, like a Soviet new town.
I Get Called Hawkeye Alda Time

Listening to something about 23% of the way through the giant playlist.

(Actually Beth Orton)

So here is Annie in her high perch, snuggled down but peeking over the top of the backpack. She is about one but she does not speak much preferring to command by being cute. Obviously I cannot see her most of the time but her serious face is sometimes reflected in shop windows or any mirrors we might pass, and when she sees herself she will straighten up, making me lean forward to balance her properly.

But now we are inside some worthy building, a local noteable’s house I think, and one reported to have a ghost. We are immediately shown the main attraction of this Elizabethan house (though the queen here was Mary). It is a large and damaged fresco on the mud wall of one room, broken up where the plaster that was put over it has fallen away. What can be seen is a number of people in typical Tudor dress engaged in strange activities that are made more mysterious by being so fragmented. No amount of local research has turned up anything about what this is though a guess has been made that the scene is something from the bible done in contemporary dress. I say that it reminds me of a similarly revealed fresco we saw in a church down south somewhere. Later this turns out to be in a completely different style but here and now it excites us as a possible solution.

And here, behind us the head shrine of Saint Margaret – the Scottish one rather than one of Saint Joan’s confidants. Well actually a reconstruction, because in another mystery, the original was stolen leaving no modern clue to its whereabouts. I imagine some strange and remote European castle, that of an ancient family, hiding this gold thing, looking after it over the years of turmoil that came from the wars between Scotland and England.

Annie up there is lost to something we cannot see and we know that this is the room where the ghost is supposed to be seen. Annie must be able to see him for she talks incessantly and without real words, burbling what she knows to be true at the monk or whatever he is. The chandelier seems to be some sort of focus and I turn so I can see her in the mirror, delighted by the gold of the light and its ancient keeper, though I struggle to see anything, being firmly in the reality of now.

Monday, May 15, 2006

I Think Fighting’s Pathetic

Listening to Part 9 of Music in Twelve Parts by Philip Glass.

I actually saved a shuffled play list so I am having a go at listening to all 350 hours of the music I have on this machine.



I think this one would have been much scarier.

Anyway, I finished The Catcher in the Rye last night. It always drags me through it and as my previous port said, I always find something new in it, like looking at a complicated picture and finding something you missed the first time. The bit with his old teacher made a lot more sense. It is obvious that the older you get the more views on what the real situations are become clear. A truism I suppose but maybe one that is not clear to some impetuous youngsters. It was true that we were made to read TCITR by a teaching student. We must have been 14 or 15 and it is obvious with hindsight that this was her favourite book and she thought she would radicalise a few poor rural saps by making them read this rather than the normal stuff we were given. I can see why so many young people see themselves in this book – so many reviews you see say “Oh my God! This book could have been written about me! I am the female version of Holden Caulfield.”

There is of course the link with Sylvia Plath in that The Bell Jar is always mentioned after Salinger’s book as being similar, though I sometimes think the similarity is simply one of locations and atmosphere though there are of course parallels in the ages and academic institutions of the main characters. I think I last read The Catcher in the Rye just after I started this blog and I then went on to read the Bell Jar. I am aiming to do this again but The Bell Jar always seems so much more clinical; it has a sense of restraint as if the narrator is filtering everything through her academic abilities rather than just dumping everything in a mad rush like Holden Caulfield. Both books however have a wonderful feeling that you are jumping in to the real places described, the time periods for both are within ten years of each other and though one starts in a sultry summer New York and the other at Christmas, they both capture the spirit of the city. It is a pity that my single, short visit to New York was before I had read either of these books properly. My view of Manhattan was that of Suzanne Vega, of Tom’s Diner, rather than the movies, fashion and shows which seem to link these two books.

I will leave you with two things. Firstly, you can make up your own joke about this childish amendment to a sign in our village though there may be a clue to my immediate thought in the name of the file.



And finally, my wife thinks that this knick-knack shop figurine looks like me and my daughter.

Friday, May 12, 2006

Forty One Glorious Blocks

I suppose you want me to start and say that this is my favourite book or something phoney like that. Well I have read it three times, actually four if you count the time the student at school made us read it. I couldn’t see the point then and some sucker had taken out all the cuss words if you want to know. Having said all that, it is still a very good book, something that makes you want to stay up all night just to finish it. And you know what! It seems to change each time you read it. It really does! There are whole chapters that I don’t remember from the last time. That bit with the second Night Club, that Eddie and his piano, I just felt that the night then must have been too short for the guy to visit two Night Clubs. It was something around eleven at night when his roommate slugged him and then he had to walk and get the train and book his room and even then he managed to go to the hotel bar. And there were people still there. When was this supposed to be? It was the forties, just after the war. I had no idea that people did that sort of thing then. But I suppose it is New York and everything, all those phoney people wanting to stay up late and be seen or look for stars like those three girls, the ugly ones and the blonde one who was twice as good as anyone else.

Poor Jane! What happened to her? That was another bit I don’t remember. Did I fall asleep when he remembered back to playing checkers and going to the movie? Just talking to that soak her mother married made her cry. Maybe he was fresh with her like he said but even not knowing is so sad. I wanted to cry at him wanting to cry when she did. Like I said, I can’t remember that bit at all from before. It’s like reading a new book each time. It really is! I should go back and read the special bits again.

Sometimes I think it’s stupid to read bits of a book without starting at the beginning and finishing it. Or in my case, more likely putting it on a pile by the bed until I forget the first bit and put it back on the shelf. I was listening to something on the radio yesterday, some woman who wrote a book called Hotel World and this book was all over the place in time, written by dead people and funny stuff like that. Maybe you could read the bits of that book in a funny order and get it back to proper time. Like Pulp Fiction, that was a good movie. I watched it once and it seemed to make sense and everything but at the end I still couldn’t work out exactly what had happened. It was like Hotel World in some places, with people you knew were dead coming back to life. No sense in that I suppose. Why do the people who write these things do that? I would want to write about something I did in the right order so you knew about it all. I can remember something now. I think it was a friend here but it may have just been a dream. She dated some high-up clever guy at the UN, an interpreter or something. She told me about walking along many blocks because they couldn’t get a cab and then she was ill because of some crab or seafood rubbish they all ate. Seems like the same book, ‘cept some poor suckers got killed at the beginning. They were something to do with spying and the Russians but she hated what they did to them. She told me all about the smoke coming off them as they died, and one of them was a woman. I don’t know enough about history – I flunked history – but it seems odd all this about the bad people in the world. I know we have to do something about it all but sometimes it’s just not the right thing to do. As I said, I flunked history so maybe I’m not the guy to ask. Anyway, I was telling you about my friend. After she got sick and everything, she went back home. She was some clever girl but when she got home she couldn’t write for her term papers or something. I don’t mean she couldn’t think of what to write. She just couldn’t write. She told me that picking up then pen made her arm hurt and that all she wanted to do was lie in bed. I get depressed and everything and then I have to sit down and think about things. And I think about this sick girl and how she couldn’t write and I get all tied up inside thinking of how she should be happy. Even without those papers there is no way she could flunk anything. Clever girl that. I get depressed more because I know what happens to her but that is all I feel like telling you about that.

I dreamed a lot last night. I was doing stuff like I do now, programming and everything but I had to be taught more but the funny thing was it was stuff I already knew. I was bored. And like all my dreams, I was outside; the desks for the teaching were all lined up in a field. It looked like it should’ve been cold as all the trees had no leaves but it was warm. They were teaching all sorts of people along with me, babies and funny people like that. What would a baby want with doing anything with a computer? I had this wonderful thing going on my screen, a sort of virtual motor with cogs and everything attached to it. I was trying to sort out if I could create a long set of cogs like they have on the coin. Do you know a funny thing about those cogs on that coin? If you count them up, then there are either an odd or even number – I can’t remember which – but whatever it is means that the cogs cannot go round. In my dream I wondered if my program would tell me this and not work because of the even or odd number of cogs. But before I could test it out, we all had to look up as someone we all knew drove a goddam truck into some sort of canal. It was one of those old trucks, like from 40 years ago; with the round front and it went into the canal and stuck in the mud with water lapping at where the driver was. Like I said, we all knew him and I ran over to the other side of the canal – only a little bit of the canal was there so I could walk round to the other side – I had to drop my stuff in the mud to get there but before I could help the driver, one of my buddies had waded into the mud and opened the door. I woke up then though maybe there was some more after the truck went in the canal and then I woke up. It is difficult to tell. I don’t know what the babies were doing. I would like to know what sort of computer stuff they did, just for the hell of it. Oh yes! All my stuff was muddy when I picked it up so I was right. I did not wake up right then.

Well that is all I want to tell you about for this time. I am not feeling completely all right at the moment if you want to know so I may have to go away and have a rest or something. Damn near laid out with this! Maybe you can come back and hear some more tomorrow or any day you want. It makes no difference to me I suppose.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Nightmare List of Applications



When you find this list of applications you begin to wonder if you are in the wrong job. I hate Excel when it is used as a database just because it is there. We should disable VBA whenever we deliver it.

I am prompted to write in rant mode about the terrible behaviour of the people who write to GSK share-holders regarding that company's use of Huntington Life Science. However, I have been moved to comment on the criticism of the BBC for the use of the word 'activists' rather than 'terrorists'. While I am quite disappointed that there seems to be nothing in existing law that can be done regarding this action - the company had to resort to an injunction - I am annoyed that someone uses this situation to have a go at the BBC for their seemingly measured use of a word. Just because you think everyone who does something that you do not agree with is a terrorist, does not mean that the media should. Possibly the intention for something which might tip over into militantcy is there. I am not going to bother to find the Daily Mail's stance on this but I'm sure that not even that fine paper would be using the 'T' word about these people yet - well maybe in the leader. Maybe we can label anyone who does anything remotely vociferous or threatening, a terrorist. Semantics is a wonderful thing to argue about but when it gets in the way of a debate as this surely does, it seems like an "angels/pin" discussion. And I am annoyed that has got me writing a whole paragraph about it. We are educated enough to make up our own minds on this issue.

I was going to say "complex issue" but this depends on your views on the subject. My view may be made clearer at a later date but for now, be aware that the 'activists' in my opinion should be expecting a very large book to be coming their way - ballistically (and metaphorically of course).
Harrisburg Area Detectives are Investigating

The July bombings narrative is out today. BBC story here. Guardian here. Calling this description of the events of 7/7 a “narrative” seems to mean that it is just a consolidated set of notes regarding the events in question, a brain dump of every possible bit of information. Rumblings seem to suggest that it will say that the bombings were not “preventable”. The report is also expected to say that the bombers, although “inspired” by al-Qaida, were not aided by it and carried out a cheap attack using techniques they found on the internet. Not having read the report, I am not sure how this is couched in terms of its relevance to the prevention of future attacks but my immediate response is “well that makes it alright then” when I should really be thinking “Oh S***!” which is what I hope the security services are thinking. If anyone radicalised enough by whatever their favourite cause is, can go ahead and pick up some tips from www.beginnersguidetobigbangs.com, we have some problems in front of us. Of course this has already been done by David Copeland who, despite being a Nazi and prepared to kill and maim in the most horrible way, seemed only to have a level of anger one step up from getting annoyed at someone cutting him up on the motorway. Invade a country and this is bound to happen whatever your dear leader says. Actually Mr. Blair said that Iraq was “no excuse” for the 7/7 bombings rather than that there was “no link” and he is of course completely right but by the same line of cause and effect, the reasons that were used to justify going into Iraq were also “no excuse”. I don’t know if there is some collective ability in the population to somehow detect the truth of a situation – I am no expert in international affairs but without an in-depth analysis of the news regarding the situation, I felt that something was not quite right with the assertion that Iraq was developing WMD. Maybe you can spot the body language of the main players and subconsciously work out the truth – as beautifully summed-up in Andrew Motion’s poem.

I suppose I should read the narrative or at least the reports on it after it is published rather than rant on about it beforehand.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Carbon Dating

No jade court, this dark house,
Some winter shelter, fragmented
But nothing more, no home
For children to feel safe.

Maybe a refugee would smile
At finding this flak-holed vessel
In the mountains as they cross
From one war to another.

Something to stop snow,
To shade the matches,
In the heights of something
Broken in the way of things.

And now the summer lightens
All this bone-grey timber,
Counting silently its age
with vapourising isotopes.

A half-life here is gone,
A billion years to iron
Beats the odds of reaching
New calendars.
My Name is Rogier and I am a Pedant

… though not a very good one.

There is more of Dan Cruickshank on TV than is absolutely required for a healthy society at the moment though his current show on Modernism is probably the best thing he has done. It comes directly after his trio of shows following the route across the country taken by the early UK pioneer of a colour film process – Claude Friese-Green which suffered because Professor Cruickshank cannot do people. My wife pointed out that he was so much more enthusiastic while wandering through the TURBINENFABRIK than he was talking to the characters related to the 1920’s films of the previous week. We were also much amused by his comment on the story from a Scottish zoo-keeper’s son regarding the escape of a polar bear into the penguin enclosure - “Aha – their natural food!” This reminds me of the time my company decided to provide an intranet-based portal to bring together disparate communities from across the world. The masthead for the page had a polar-bear and a penguin staring at each other across icy wastes which prompted some grumbling about the inaccuracy of such a picture. Of course the idea of the site was to bring together people who would normally be “poles-apart” and so was entirely apt and correct. Not like the “Company Stationary” link from the same page which is not something you want so see used in connection with the huge growth that we were experiencing at the time.

Dan in the Turbine hall made me think again of my own experience of factories. I do feel rather nostalgic for the noisy days of the high-tech assembly line. I worked on the systems to record the positions of the manufactured items across the floor – each of these was of very high value and had an individual serial number which was used to provide accurate information regarding its position on the floor. Because of this, I actually got quite a good view of the whole manufacturing process. Some of the electronic components were inserted by machine for manual soldering and these components had to be attached to bandoliers with the various items in the correct sequence so the floor began with a couple of long machines with hoppers for each type of component. In operation, these made a loud and rhythmic clicking, very like a complex jazz drum pattern – something that Stewart Copeland would understand. It was quite hypnotic and almost continuous – the defining sound of the whole place.

The most numerous of the circuit boards were made almost wholly automatically using a conveyor which took the items through various stages of component insertion, soldering and completion without them being touched by anyone. At the far end of the floor, the boards would be tested but this had to be done manually, taking the boards out of their storage boxes and placing them on the vacuum beds of the testers. The serial numbers of the main unit consisted of six digits and I can remember when this rolled over. I’m not sure that this meant we had made a million of them because I think they started at 200,000 some time before I joined the company but from my view of the function of these things and the fact that they supplied a national utility, it is entirely possible that there are a million or more of them out there each with a manufacturing cost in the hundreds.

The units also had to have a variant number which was another six digit number with three blocks of two to define the variant of the unit. We experimented with bar-coding these as well, even down to trying to get these and the standard serial numbers etched on the millimetre thick edges of the boards. Some of them did go out with small barcodes labels which due to space restrictions we had to reduce down to 4 characters. I worked out that by using base 36 – all the alphabetic characters and 10 digits, I could convert the six digits to 4 characters. Years later, an independent company with some of these units rang up asking for the algorithm used to do this conversion. We had to work the conversion out from scratch which I think was my first VB program. The variant was also etched physically onto the board but this was not readable by machine.

The whole atmosphere of the place was one of things being done, no feeling that progress was stifled by six levels of meeting before anything was produced. We did have legal requirements and process requirements for certifications but these never seemed to get in the way of the actual job of turning out completed items.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Mr. Suso #2, With reflection

I have been reading the blog of Rachel from North London a lot recently, basically because it immediately flagged itself in the white noise of blogs that I visit as having a standard of writing far above the normal level. Yesterday's tribute to her fiance was breathtaking and then to follow it up with a left hook like today's article somehow consolidates her already strong position in the cream of blogging. It somehow makes irrelevant not only most blogging (mine included of course) but also the view in certain fine organs that all bloggers are self-centered in the extreme. She has an eye for damning detail in the bluster about 7/7 that rises above the normal stuff of such reports. The bottom line with everything these days is complexification - a self-referential word - and this seems to result in most people switching off from what really matters. Real attention to detail suffers because most detail is just like junk DNA, irrelevant filler to shade the real story. Of course, no organisation can rely 100% on this form of technical-truth-but-practical-lie, because there is always someone with enough ambition to get at the truth. It then becomes a question of how many people you can actually fool. There seems to be an equation in use here - a relationship between how much damage will be done by the truth, how many people are likely to find the truth and how important the truth actually is in the giant scheme of things. In the case of 7/7, all factors in the equation are high value so expect some nit-picking and counter-argument of high order.

I haven't spell-checked this so excuse its ranty feel.
Anything You Could Ever Want

PJ Harvey is at the Hay Festival this year. I cannot think of a more perfect day but I cannot go. Before we were married, my wife and I went to Hay, not for the festival, just to look at books and let’s face it there is not much else to look at in Hay-on-Wye. It was about this time of year and we combined it with a visit to my parents over in Malvern. My wife was petrified meeting them for the first time, worrying that they would not like her. I hope she considers that this was a groundless fear. A few years later we took my dad over there so he could look for a magazine cover he remembered from when he was a kid, a factual thing like Look and Learn but with a picture of two children gazing out over the various delights of technology that could be found within. And we found it! I wish I could remember what it was called because I am sure I could find a scanned image of it somewhere.

I have been reminded of this because today has the same weather as on that first trip down. Weather makes so much of memory, the smells and atmospheres, the humidity and light – they all seem to be so much more evocative than plain sights and sounds. At the time they do not get noticed as our brains are overwhelmed by the wider bandwidth of information from our eyes and ears but this seems to be filtered out until all inputs result in the same amount of information ending up in long-term storage. Just thinking of this makes me realise how much processing of our input information gets done before it ends up backed up. The process has never been defined but is the ultimate information system, an elegant flow from photons and air-compressions to a matrix of memory distributed and backed up in our brains. It always appears better to be able to finish a complete design document and then code up a finished system. Of course, this hardly ever happens despite the best efforts of the project managers and the specifiers and coders perform a sort of dance, a heuristic approach with two participants. The evolutionary process which has turned out the complexity of life has produced an elegant result without any original design and is the ultimate heuristic loop. I do realise that the systems designed by human beings are mostly far simpler than even the most basic processes of life but in that case shouldn’t we use those processes to test some sort of evolutionary design?

I am currently working on a complex spreadsheet which has many data items all interrelated, with an almost chaotic output based on tiny changes to the inputs. On top of this, the organization has many copies of the spreadsheet, one for each of many entities and though there is no physical link to the spreadsheets, each one is logically a node of a subjective network of entities. The individual sheets already remind me of a neural network, albeit a very fuzzy one and then on top of this, the whole network could be seen as a meta-network. We are all too busy concentrating on the details of the local processing to take a look at the whole thing to see if anything useful could be done. I am conscious of the fact that I am trying to explain this without going into any detail of what the process is actually for. Even a single sentence describing what organization this relates to, would give you a much clearer picture of the real-world situation. Now I am a c# man, the neural network I have always wanted to code is more of a possibility. What with the graphics of the fractal program, something to recognize handwriting may be forthcoming. We shall see.

I finished The Last Three Minutes and for some mad reason decided to start on Catcher in the Rye. I was going to read A Moment of War , the last in Laurie Lee’s trilogy of autobiography, having finished listening to Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, but reading the book and not hearing the power and passion of Lee reading it himself seemed weirdly empty. I will have to wait a bit before starting it again.

Monday, May 08, 2006

The Mythical

That nice Stuart Maconie played Drumming by Steve Reich last night – well a bit of it – it is longer than an hour. You will have read my rants about how wonderful Music for 18 Musicians is. Well, this is nothing to what I feel about Drumming. The only reason it has not been reviewed is that I cannot find it in the Tardis-like caverns of the garage. If you have heard MF18M and didn’t like it, then do not go near Drumming. It starts with an unvarying drum pattern of devastating simplicity and catchiness which after a while begins to introduce other instruments all playing the same rhythm over and over, each one higher up the scale until it is just Glockenspiel. There is some mucking about with subtraction and addition of various notes but that is about it. Most of it isn’t actually drumming but the pattern is there all through. It will drive you mad or lift you to paradise. I will have to dig it out.
Bring on Those Last Three Minutes

I’m nearly finished with Paul Davies’ examination of the possible ends for this cosmos we call home. He split the possible outcomes into those pertaining to an ever-expanding universe and those for one where gravity gets the better of it all and we end up with a big crunch. I think I once suggested that visions of heaven could fill up the split seconds before death giving an illusion of eternity and this is very similar to a situation discussed in this book. There is a possibility that even in the finite seconds left to any intelligent entity, the oscillations that result will allow this entity to have an infinite number of brain states therefore allowing it to ‘imagine’ a correspondingly infinite number of things, to be able to create whole virtual worlds that last for a subjective eternity. Sounds weird but gives hope to the nihilists. My old friend Bertrand Russell, crops up several times as the epitome of atheism, with his nihilism being the result of the knowledge that the universe would end. I think my response, even allowing for my uninformed support for the new cosmologists, would be for Mr Russell to get some perspective – the universe has some years left to go either way. He is of course dead now which sort of proves his point regarding pessimism and the future, and therefore had no knowledge of the possible extra ends to the universe, chilling and instant transformations of matter through flips in the semi-stable state of all matter which mean we all vapourise along with everything else in an instant with NO warning. But then again, we will never know about that so why worry. I could be an hour away from such an event – a second – a lifetime – an evolutionary timescale. The fact that this paragraph is complete means that …….


Sorry! Just joking there!

I got this at the weekend, not that I’ve been able to watch it yet as the small boy is at the stage where he will repeat anything. Along with his sister, he has been enjoying the “Cracking Contraptions” extras on the Curse of the Were-Rabbit DVD. His particular favourite is the Autochef, maybe because the device in question looks a bit like a Dalek, and he has found a catchphrase in the poor robot’s pre-demise expletive of “knickers”. He follows this up with an approximation of the resulting explosion in the form of a raspberry and a huge smile. Unfortunately his sister has also taken this on board but can quote the rest of the sketch as well including “More tea vicar?” (which she says as “Naughty Vicar”) and the very dodgy line of “Something for the weekend Sir?” My plan to have all the kids doing “Clap, Clap, Grabowski” in the playground has not worked but I worry that we will be called into school because of the chant of “Something for the weekend Sir?” We have tried to explain why this is not polite phrase but she keeps forgetting. Maybe a useful entry point into the inevitable “health education” talk which will be on us anytime now. Never had that embarrassment in my life – my mother was a doctor – and I suspect that my year 5 project on the human body resulted in a sudden bringing forward of the relevant lessons at my school. That Desmond Morris has a lot to answer for though I suspect that I was not the only one in the class to have a working knowledge of the subject due to the knowing and ironic reply to the Question posed at the start of the dodgy seventies cartoon we were shown. “Where do babies come from?” was met with a shout of “Mars!” from the back row.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Very Victorian or beware of the Glue Man

It is one of those bright afternoons, where faces are marked with a frown to shade out the sun. There is a scene in A Canterbury Tale where the military visitors to the Twin Peaksy-type village that is the centre of the story, visit what I think was a carpenters shop. It was a day like today, bright and balmy but in the film, the relaxed atmosphere was contrasted with the trials of the main characters against the backdrop of the war.

I've just finished reading Ben Fogle's first book, The Teatime Islands which details his travels to the last island outposts of the UK. You might expect Mr. Castaway to be rathe rlight and fluffy and he is quite a lot of the time but in a way which seems to get under the skin of places, much in the same way that Louis Theroux does but without the knowing winks to the camera. Ben has a wonderful ability to understand when being a bit more forthright is required for the sake of the flow. It was sad to see him denied a day on Pitcairn (due to all the recent issues of that island). You know exactly who's side he is on though you might not guess until afterwards. I am looking forward to the next book - Offshore which is about a simliar island odyssey though a bit closer to home with a chance that I may have actually been to some of the places. A sudden desire to visit St. Helena came over me until practicality reasserted itself. I've been to the Outer Hebrides and Shetland (as well as the boring close-in ones like Anglesey and The isle of Wight). However, my wife is reading Offshore first which means I'll probably have the next Harry Potter before I get my hands on it.
On Reflection

Every time I visit a motorway service station, a thought occurs to me and I say I must blog that. Unfortunately I never remember it – until now. I am afraid that the thought is sparked by the strange curvy-conical device which sits over the drain holes of the urinals. Now I am not 100% certain of the function of this device but I assume it is meant to avoid splashback and is specially designed so that any fluid flow directed at it will bounce off it away from any user. In best James Burke mode I made a connection with something which I think is rather similar. Years ago, when I was space mad, I read The High Frontier by Gerald K. O’Neill which detailed a very practical plan for setting up colonies in space. These often involved long cylinders, shielded from solar radiation but with large transparent strips designed to let in light reflected from giant mirrors arranged outside. This light was then further reflected off a strange curvy-conical device to illuminate the interior of the colony where the living areas were arranged on the inner surfaces of the cylinder. I can find plenty of pictures of the outside of these colonies but nothing showing this weird, internal mirror.

This of course makes me very sad, that a concept designed with high, human aspirations in mind has, albeit through convergent evolution, cropped up to prevent embarrassing staining to trousers. This is the way of the world these days. Prompted by a minor rant from my wife regarding us being slaves to technology, I was thinking about how we now spend so much time designing things to improve our ‘systems’ in society and I found my self in best Grumpy-old-man style, wondering how we managed before all this. We seem to spend so much time writing stuff to record how bad we are, how we are doing and then not spending time in making those bad things better. We are always told we must have a plan for achievement but no one is ever jumped on to ensure that those plans are followed. The only important thing is the report that tells us how things are going. Maybe a good telling off would be appropriate but that does not fit with the modern view. I’d be much happier being shouted at than being ignored I think. Unless of course, the economy is a sort of bloodless version of the war in nineteen-eighty-four, something to keep the plebs happy and unrevolting.

I did have so much structure to this discussion but I just can’t be bothered any more which makes me a part of the problem. Anyway, news that the Universe may be a trillion years older than we thought is in the papers today, so my (and all human) significance just got less by a factor of … er … lots and lots. The idea of many big bangs one after the other, is not new. I have read about it many times, once at least in God and The New Physics by Paul Davies, the author of my current reading – The Last Three Minutes. This has just reached a chapter regarding the possibilities for the running down of the universe if it was given enough time. For what could be a dull science book, the view of the whimpers at the end of the universe is quite an artistic read. Eventually everything will run down to nothing but the sequence of events is far more complex than just a gradual darkening of things as they disperse to dead matter distributed as gas throughout space. Black Holes swallow things and get bigger but then shrink due to Hawking Radiation, some gas gets sucked in but some just disperses. What happens to all those neutrinos? Not something I will have to worry about though I expect the Government have a report to measure the effect on the economy. Maybe they will have a plan in place for what to do in the event of the completion of the entropy cycle. Crisis! What Crisis?

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Get Ready To Wimple

Call that maths? This is maths!



(and the working as well)



(Yes - I know there should be some comments in there but it's not work - it's personal. And the variable names might not be spottedGnu form or whichever animal it is supposed to be.)

As you can see, I have gone over completely to the dark side (c# to you mate!) though for some terrible sin from my past I now have to do some VBA while the good stuff goes on hold. The only problem is the invariable addition (by me) of semi-colons to each line. VBA does not like this for some reason. The fractal program showed me that while it takes so much more coding to get something working in c#, the result is much more elegant. I have at least managed to get a wider range of colours though artistically they might not be ideal. I am also finding that at high zoom levels, the accuracy starts to diminish which means I need to try and use the complex number classes I found rather than muddle through with my real and imaginary mock-ups.