The Dos and Don'ts of Home Decor, or The Great Escape
12th May 2008Last month I moved to a place of my own after living for a quarter of a century in the family home. It's only now I've got round to writing about it, but as it happens, I've just remembered I wrote this in advance way back in March, and it's been sitting in a file on my computer for a month and a half. So I've pasted it, updated it, edited it, and published it.
There are some important points to be made about home furnishings, and when you live in the same house for twenty-five years, you get to notice all the things you would do differently.
Lighting
Let's go over a basic principle. The purpose of lighting is to illuminate the room. This is a fairly straightforward concept, but some people don't grasp it. Lights are not there to provide so-called "ambience". They are not there to look pretty. If you walk into a room and immediately notice the wonderful lighting, rather than the actual room and its contents, then you're doing it wrong.
Lights are there to enable you to see the things in the room, not the light itself. Turning off the lights at the end of the day should be a matter of pressing a button on the wall, not of going round every nook and cranny in the room trying to find all the switches because fiddly little bulbs have been crammed into every cavity that could possibly house them.
And yes, my parents' living room is a textbook example of what not to do. The living room alone has two lights on the ceiling controlled by a switch on the wall next to the door, which is correct. That's what the house was built with, and that's all it needs. However, there have now been added no fewer than five other lamps dotted around the room. Old bedside lamps from long ago have been repurposed and placed at anti-strategic points on shelves and in cupboards around the living room for maximum inconvenience. It wouldn't be so bad if they were all controlled from one switch, but they're not. To switch them off at the end of the day you've got to go round all of them, and the switches are of course in the least accessible locations possible, because we don't want anyone to see them, do we? What would visitors think if they knew our lights were controlled by electric switches and not by some sort of magic?
This new place, on the other hand, has a correct lighting layout. The only lights are the ones dangling from the ceiling. They're operated from switches on the wall within easy reach. There is one free-standing "uplighter" in the living room; it hasn't got a bulb in it, hasn't had one since I moved in, and won't have one before I move out.
Also, while on the subject of lighting, I should mention lampshades. If you must have them at all, they should be translucent, not opaque. Their purpose, where necessary, is to prevent you being dazzled by the bare bulb. Those upturned-cone shaped lampshades that mad people fit to the lights dangling from the ceiling and call "uplighters" serve only to block out the light. If the light is too bright, put a less bright bulb in, don't just block it out.
"But wait," I hear you protest, "uplighters illuminate the ceiling!" So they do. I'll remember that the next time I decide the laws of gravity aren't worth bothering with and I become a ceiling-dwelling creature, but for the moment I spend most of my time near the floor. I'm not up there. I don't want the light shining up there. I want it shining down here, where I and all the other objects in the room are.
Ornaments, Trinkets, Plants, Potpourri, etc.
Ideally, these should be completely absent. If you must have them, they should be out of the way so they can't interfere with anything. Putting a vase of flowers on the kitchen worktop just wastes space on the kitchen worktop. It does not brighten up the room, it just gets in the way. The same goes for potpourri. I don't know who originally came up with the idea of granting pride of place on an otherwise useful table or desk to a useless bowl of dried vegetation, but they're probably also behind those silly upside-down lampshades that reflect light coming from a bulb on the ceiling up to the ceiling where it's least needed.
To explain what I mean about pointless trinkets that are more of a liability than an asset, the following pictures from around my parents' house illustrate perfectly the sort of thing you should not do:
Wicker baskets containing such useful things as towels, teatowels
and oven gloves being bravely defended by useless ornaments that have to be
moved before you can slide the basket out.
Of course, the sensible solution to the problem above would have been to slide a wicker basket out to get a teatowel while pretending the ornament isn't there. *crash* "Oops. Oh well, that solves that problem."
Some more examples of superfluous ornaments in my parents' house:
This arrangement has an air of evil genius about it. To get at the
crackers, you first had to remove the toast rack, which, naturally, was never
used except as a decorative trinket. Then when you took the cracker tin, that
silly wooden tray thing would fall down, as the cracker tin was the only thing
keeping it propped up against the wall. It's blu-tacked to the wall in the
image; I did that to stop the madness.
From the corner of the same kitchen. Your guess is as good as mine
what purpose is served by a load of glass jars full of rocks and shells taking
up kitchen worktop space. Come to think of it, that sounds like something mum
would say. "It's to fill a space."
Cushions
Sofas and armchairs come shipped with all the cushions they require. For each seat, there's a horizontal one that you sit on, and a vertical one you lean on. They're usually an integral part of the sofa or armchair, and they may be affixed to it somehow. What you absolutely do not want is extra cushions that just sit there occupying the sofa like some kind of spare cat.
If you've ever found yourself sitting down on the sofa, standing up again, moving all the cushions that got in the way of you sitting down to another part of the room (usually another armchair which by now has half a dozen cushions piled on top of it) then sitting down again, you'll know that cushions are nothing more than a waste of space. It's like someone sat at a desk and said, "do you know, there really aren't enough useless lumps of crap cluttering the place. Let's fill a few bags full of feathers and leave them lying around the most-used room in the house."
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Two views of the same sofa. How many cushions can you possibly need? Yes, it really is that difficult to find a place to sit on the sofa, because there are far too many cushions. Note also, in the left-hand image, the sphere of vegetation dangling from the shelf, the giant bowl of potpourri taking up all the space on what would otherwise be a useful table, and the ornaments taking up space on the shelves. Actually, I agree with that last bit - better to have an entire shelf for all the ornaments rather than having them compete for space with real objects.
As for plants indoors, you do have to wonder what kind of person first thought, "Plants. Organisms which grow in soil and which require water and sunlight. I know! They obviously belong inside!"
The right way
So, that's the house I've just escaped. The following pictures are from the house I now live in:
This kitchen is about half the size of the one in my parents' house, yet there's
the same amount of usable worktop space. Why? No ornaments!
Only two superfluous cushions, ample seating space, and, what's this? Even a
bin in the lounge! Way back in the dim and distant past, we used to have a bin
in the lounge in Witney, but mum took it away, largely because people used it.
So there was just one small bin in a kitchen cupboard to take all the rubbish
from an entire floor of a five-person house. And that was if there was nobody
standing in front of the cupboard at the time.
Old Home and New Home
Parents' house. That front door, with its "closed equals locked"
configuration, is a blitherance for another day.
My place. No, I didn't put any of those plants there, but (a) they're not a
problem because they're outside, and so are lit, watered and fed by the
ancient but rather effective beast known as nature, and (b) the tenancy
agreement states I'm not responsible for plants that die.
The results of our competition...
3rd April 2008Last week, we asked you to complete the following sentence in no more than fifteen words:
"We object to the proposed eco-town in our area because..."
We've had hundreds of entries, and we were astounded by their originality. Normally, when it's just a housing development being built, you can mumble something about putting pressure on the local schools, public services, roads and other infrastructure, and, with a quick hand-wave, say this proves the houses shouldn't be built (because building more schools, expanding the public services, or adding more roads is beyond anyone's comprehension), and hey presto, the nasty developers go away. But because it's a series of self-contained towns being built, with their own services and transport links, you've had to get pretty creative with your objections.
We thought plans to build towns on quarries, disused Ministry of Defence land and other brownfield land might have stumped some of you; no doubt you were thinking of playing that trusty "We're Losing Our Greenfield Land" card! We expected some of you to fall back on the "Increased Traffic" card, or even the tired old "Spoiling The View" card, and hope nobody points out that you can't stay on the outskirts of town forever (just ask the people living further in, in whose view your house was built), but only a few of you have resorted to that. The creativity of some of the suggested objections took us quite by surprise. Here are the winners:
We object to the proposed eco-town in our area because...
... a shiny new town in north Oxfordshire might make nearby Bicester look bad
Well done to Councillor Keith Mitchell, leader of Oxfordshire County Council, for that. Obviously we can't go giving people nice places to live, or housing in Oxfordshire might be shown up as the rip-off it is! Nice work, councillor!... we don't think Selby could compete for business with a new town
Congratulations to our second winner, a spokesman on behalf of residents in Selby, North Yorkshire, taking a position against free-market economics on this issue. I'm sure you're grateful that your houses have trebled in price over the last decade - oh wait, that's "good" free-market economics, isn't it. When you're on the losing side, it's "bad" free-market economics. My mistake.... there isn't enough water
A well-deserved win by Nick Herbert, Conservative MP for Arundel and South Downs. Of course, new houses consume water! It's not as if it's the people who consume water, is it? It's a little-known fact that all those people priced out of the property market, stuck in their parents' house or in rented accommodation, don't already use water. They make do with earth, air and fire for food, flush the toilet with sand, and run the washing machine by collecting the water vapour evaporating from the foreheads of angry neighbours complaining about housing developments. As soon as these freaks of nature become homeowners, they'll start using water and drain it all away, so well done for pointing that out, Mr Herbert!
An honourable mention goes to the dozens of people who played the Wildlife card. This tactic itself isn't new: time after time the public are expected to believe that all the local residents have suddenly taken a keen interest in the welfare of whatever convenient flora or fauna happens to have been spotted anywhere near the proposed site recently, and it's not about nimbyism at all. We think some people may be getting wise to this, but in any case, it's a useful catch-all excuse to object to anything.
Congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to all who took part!
Region coding and alternators.
11th November 2007In case you aren't aware, DVDs are tied to a region. Region 1 is the USA, and Region 2 is Europe and some other places. The idea is that a DVD bought in one region won't play on a DVD player bought in another region. The entertainment industry makes a number of arguments in favour of this, but they invariably neglect to mention that discouraging consumers from importing DVDs from another region has the very convenient side-effect of allowing them to charge obscene amounts of money for the same content here compared with over the pond.
Unfortunately, with increased price differences and a pathetic dollar-pound exchange rate, they've somewhat shot themselves in the foot. Here's an example. All prices are correct at the time of writing, and I'm using the BBC's currency information, which puts a pound at $2.09, accurate to the nearest cent.
Heroes season 1 box set, region 1, from amazon.com: $39.99, or £19.18.
Heroes season 1 box set, region 2, from amazon.co.uk: £41.98.
So, consumers in the UK are paying more than double for exactly the same DVD. The movie industry would like you to believe that you can't just import the region 1 box set from the US, because it won't play in your region 2 DVD player. But hang on a minute...
Region 1 DVD player, from amazon.com, $27.99 (£13.42).
So you could buy the region 1 box set, and a region 1 DVD player, for £32.60, and it's cheaper than forking out £41.98 for the region 2 box set, which, by the way, isn't even released yet. I know shipping costs might scupper the idea, but prices of DVD players have come down so much now that you can probably pick one up for less than £20 at a supermarket, and change it to region 1 (a DVD player should let you change its region up to five times), and it'll still be cheaper. When it's cheaper to buy a whole new DVD player solely to watch an imported DVD than to get ripped off for the UK release like a good little consumer, there's something wrong.
In unrelated news, recently, my car has been making a squeak-squeak-squeak noise. The Haynes manual, under the helpful-as-ever "noises" section of the troubleshooting chapter, asked me to define it as pinking, whistling, wheezing, tapping, rattling, knocking or thumping, none of which accurately described the cacophony emanating from the vehicle.
I found out what it was, though, when driving back from Bracknell at half past midnight after a company social event on Friday night. The battery light came on, with a thud and a beep (in that order) and I stopped at the services, opened the bonnet, and saw the drive belt was not in its usual place of neatly wrapped round the pulley wheels, but flapping about uselessly around the engine compartment. The AA patrolman, when he turned up, diagnosed the fault as a disintegrated alternator pulley, which I photographed the next day. That red dust all over the place is the mechanism that was once a part of the alternator pulley.
You know when you take a car into a garage to get it fixed, and they mumble about lack of parts for a while before being kind enough to provide you with a courtesy car for a few days, it's always the crappiest, most pathetic model that exists? The car they've given me is a 2001 Fabia, a year older than mine, has scratches all over it, has probably been used and abused by all and sundry, and has a little yellow "there's something wrong with your engine" light permanently illuminated on the dashboard ("but don't worry about that"), but nevertheless has more features than my car. Pleasantly surprising, but also slightly annoying.
Cloud cuckoo land.
16th October 2007Last year, glorified dinner lady Prue Leith recommended that schoolchildren should be given less choice at the school dinner hall, while any reasonable human being might have suggested that they be offered a greater choice consisting of healthy food. "If I had my way we'd go back to no choice," she said. "I don't care whose fault it was, go to the back," she didn't add, but might as well have done.
Now, not content with merely worsening school meal choice for no good reason, she continues her war on children by going after their pocket money as well. It's as if she believes children go round saying "ugh, healthy food, I don't like healthy." More like "the only thing the school cooks are capable of preparing that doesn't taste like weasel dung is this idiot-proof ready-to-cook junk food."
Oh, you're aged between 17 and 25. That must be the problem.
19th July 2007Another day, another report blaming all of motoring's ills on the young. Normally it's road safety organisations or pressure groups that come up with this sort of thing, but this time, the government's own random pathetic policy generator (or "Transport Select Committee" as they like to call it) are jumping on the bandwagon faster than a cabinet minister admitting to cannabis use. BBC link here, full Transport Committee report here.
For those who can't be bothered to read the full report, or even to read the BBC's digestion of it, the salient points, along with my commentary thereon, are as follows.
The minimum legal driving age should be raised to 18, but 17 year olds should still be allowed to drive as learners.
This is the least disagreeable of the proposals. Yes, I can see how 17 year old drivers might benefit from a full year of supervised driving. The report also includes suggestions that there should be a minimum learning period and a minimum number of hours of tuition. However, instead of raising the legal driving age to 18, you have to ask if the same result can't be achieved by keeping the minimum age at 17 and allowing people to drive as learners a year earlier, from the age of 16. The report addresses this (paragraph 51) and dismisses it, stating that there would need to be "very robust evidence that this would have a beneficial impact on road casualty rates". Well, if you're not even going to try it, you're not going to get the evidence, are you? It's a bit like when your mum didn't let you cycle to school because you hadn't ever cycled to school before.
From these questionable, but at least reasonably sensible, proposals, the report quickly descends into something that sounds like the "put your coat on the lower peg" scene from Monty Python's Meaning of Life...
Novice drivers should be prohibited from carrying passengers aged between 10 and 20 between the hours of 11pm and 5am.
"Novice driver", by the way, is not clearly defined in the report, but it observes (paragraph 5) that in research studies, it includes all those with less than three years' driving experience. To the report's credit, it separates the definition of "novice driver" from "young driver", terms which previously have been treated as the same thing by the press and road safety groups. It ruins this a bit by appearing to use the terms interchangeably later in the report, but it also acknowledges (paragraph 51) that experience is a bigger factor in collision risk than age, although age is still significant.
But back to the specific point of curfewing lift-giving novice drivers. The justification given for this is that a high number of passengers in a car pushes up the average fatality rate, as is shown by this graph in paragraph 102 of the report. So the greater the number of passengers in a car, the more fatalities there are going to be when it crashes? Well, well, well. Who'd have thought it?
The picture they're painting, of course, is that if a novice driver is giving a lift to someone aged between 10 and 20 at night, the statistics strongly suggest that the driver goes under the name of "Baz" and is showing off the capabilities of his modified Corsa to, and being encouraged to commit legally questionable manoeuvres by, the other three brain cells occupying the vehicle. Never mind the mother who passed her test two years ago but now can't pick up her 16 year old son from a party, or those in their late teens who work in a bar or restaurant and share lifts back home at night — they're all going to be assumed to be dangerous drivers until proven inno... er, no, just assumed to be dangerous drivers.
This tar/brush approach is also prevalent in another proposal in the report...
Reduce the legal alcohol limit for novice drivers.
At present, the legal limit is 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, or 0.8g/l. The report recommends in paragraph 110 a limit of "zero (or 0.2g/l, which in practice is effectively zero) for novice drivers." Leaving aside the fact that a drunk driver is dangerous regardless of their age or driving experience, won't this just send the incorrect message that once you pass your third year of driving, or your 21st birthday, or whatever the boundary would be, you can drink four times as much and still be safe to drive?
The very same paragraph addresses this concern, noting that the Department for Transport "must be assiduous in countering any impression that it is acceptable for more experienced drivers to drive under the influence of alcohol". It's difficult to see how they propose to counter this impression in the face of a law that states exactly that. The report barely mentions the much more sensible idea of lowering the limit for all drivers, rather than just novices.
"involved"
I've left this bit until last. It's the use of the word "involved" to produce statistics from which the only requirement is that they have the appearance of backing up the argument without actually doing so. All media articles and government reports, not just this Transport Select Committee report, when attempting to justify their latest batch of laws discriminating against the young, always quote the same statistic. The numbers might change according to which survey they're using, but it's always worded as follows.
"In 1998, drivers aged 17-21 accounted for 7% of the total driving population, but they comprised 13% of drivers involved in collisions."
That's from paragraph 7 of the report. In fact, paragraph 7 consists only of statistics like this, so I'll reproduce the whole paragraph. Note the persistent use of "involved" rather than "at fault".
7. Novice drivers are at a significantly increased risk of being involved in a road collision. Several statistics illustrate the problem:in 1998, drivers aged 17-21 accounted for 7% of the total driving population, but they comprised 13% of drivers involved in collisions; one in eight driving licence holders is aged under 25, yet one in three drivers who die in a collision is under 25, and almost one in two drivers killed at night is under 25; 27% of 17-19 year-old males are involved in a road collision as a driver in their first year of driving; 1,077 people died in 2005 in crashes involving a driver aged 17-25 (of whom 377 were drivers aged 17-25).
OK. Case study: me. It was July 2002 (making me 19, and therefore automatically a reckless boy-racer in the eyes of the Department for Transport), and I was on a driving lesson, a week before I passed my test. After stalling at a roundabout, as was my special signature manoeuvre as a learner, the driver behind failed to notice that I hadn't driven off, and drove straight into the back of me. No injuries, just a very large dent to the back of my instructor's car. Now, note that I was shunted from behind, and therefore not at fault. Government statistics don't seem to make this distinction. I'm one of the 27% of 17-19 year old males involved in a crash in their first year of driving, so they're using my accident, in which I was blameless, to paint me as the dangerous driver who should be subject to curfews and limits on passenger numbers. And I'm sure I'm not the only young driver who's had someone drive into them. How many of the 27% were at fault in their collision? We don't know. Perhaps when they collect these statistics, they don't record such trivial information as which one was the careless/dangerous driver, and which was the victim. It's a lot easier to assume, for a purpose so trifling and inconsequential as drafting the country's road traffic law, that if a driver gets crashed into, they must be in the wrong because they're under 25.
So, this is a message to all government committees and to the press. If you want to highlight how young drivers' inexperience makes them a greater risk, then fine. I'm not for one second saying that inexperienced drivers aren't a greater risk; by all intuition and common sense, they are. But what we want are the statistics on how many accidents have a young driver at fault, rather than where a young person was loosely involved in events. Articles whose writer has gone to the trouble to make the distinction between being "at fault" and being "involved in" a collision are few and far between, but this is such a BBC article. It states that in 2003, up to 24% of convictions for causing death by dengerous driving were handed to drivers 20 or younger, despite them comprising just 2% of licence holders. OK, that's not perfect (what do you mean, "up to" 24%?), but it shows that relevant statistics do exist. So if you're going to try to portray us all as dangerous maniacs, at least do it right.
Giant Cuckoos for Big Ben!
19th April 2007Those of you who listen to Radio 4 might have heard Mark Thomas: My Life in Serious Organised Crime a few weeks ago. The background is the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which makes it an offence to organise, or take part in, any demonstration in Parliament Square or its surroundings without permission from the police six days in advance. This part of the law was brought in specifically to remove peace activist Brian Haw from Parliament Square - he's been demonstrating there since 2001. As it happened, Brian Haw couldn't be subjected to the law retrospectively, as he'd been demonstrating since before it came into force.
So, we now have a useless law that didn't work, but is still enforced on demonstrators. Peace campaigner Maya Evans was convicted under the law; her crime was reading out a list of names of the Iraq war dead in Whitehall without permission. A man was asked by police to move on because he was reading a copy of the Guardian, whose front page that day contained a story unfavourable to the government. And a woman was threatened with arrest for eating a cake with the word "peace" iced upon it.
The almost universal response to this situation has been bloggers sitting and whining about it, like I'm doing now. But then, there are people like Mark Thomas, comedian and political activist, who seek to change the law by, in his words, playing with it. So, on the third Wednesday of every month, Mark organises a Mass Lone Demonstration in Parliament Square. Normal attendance is about a hundred. Each person is demonstrating individually on a different issue, so the police need to give permission for each and every demonstration to go ahead. They're not allowed to refuse permission (although conditions can be imposed in certain circumstances), otherwise they'd be in breach of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees the right to a peaceful demonstration. And what better way to demonstrate how much of an unnecessary load this is on the police than by dozens of people trooping down to Charing Cross police station on the previous Wednesday, the second Wednesday of the month, all at the same time, to hand in their applications for permission? "Yes, we, each and every one of us, want to demonstrate individually, and, what rotten luck, we've all turned up at the same time. Oh well, better form a very long queue..." On his radio programme, Mark Thomas said that the demonstrator who was threatened with arrest for displaying the word "peace" iced on a cake handed in her form written in icing on a giant Victoria sponge, because there's nothing in the law that says your request for permission to demonstrate has to be on paper.
So I decided to go along. In fact, I decided this the night before the second Wednesday of April. And on that night, I printed off, and filled in, Metropolitan Police form 3175A, below.
On Wednesday 11th April, after work, I got the train into London, found Charing Cross police station, and handed the form in. The throng of people that usually meet on the second Wednesday of the month at this police station had already been and gone, but I handed in the form nonetheless. The officer at the desk said that someone would be in touch.
Three days later, I received permission to go ahead with my demonstration:
Yup, the muppets missed out puffin crossings. Never mind. I decided to demonstrate about them anyway. What kind of cretin invented a pedestrian crossing that does away with the common-sense flashing-amber phase of pelican crossings, in favour of the "stay red until I've sensed the pedestrian has left the crossing" approach? All it does is stay red until the pedestrian has left the crossing, left the street, and possibly left the town entirely.
But how was I going to protest about all those things? Obviously I'd need many placards. Unless I could build a device that combined many placards into one....
One weekend and a trip to the DIY shop later, I had invented the Omni-Plac 7000!
It consists of twelve A2-size sheets of paper sellotaped together and put on a roll, which can be scrolled by the two handles to change what is being displayed. The post and the base even hang on to the main unit for ease of carrying, as seen below. You carry it by the carrying handle, on the right of the placard as seen in the picture below, between the two turning handles.
Incidentally, the slogans were, in order:
with two sheets spare.The government has given me so many things to protest about that I had to build a scrolling placard I've got far too much time on my hands Why should my generation be ripped off? Build more homes Ban Arial on public signage Scrap puffin crossings: bring back pelicans Welcome to Parliament Square: unapproved exhibition of opinion is prohibited Giant cuckoos for Big Ben The clock tower should be officially renamed to 'Big Ben'. Aren't you fed up of pedants (like me) saying it isn't called that? Why is a house price boom a good thing again? and, because mum insisted that I get a photograph of myself holding the placard,Down with mothers who insist on photographs
Wednesday the 18th of April rolled around punctually as expected. I'd taken the day off work. I put the Omni-Plac 7000 in the car, drove to the station, and got on a Paddington-bound train, lugging the MDF monstrosity with me. I left it set on "I've got too much time on my hands" in the hope that it would go some way towards alleviating the confusion of passers-by.
At 5.15pm, I got to Paddington. This being a Wednesday evening, just as people are finishing work for the day. So I'm standing on a crowded rush-hour tube train with a hulking great Heath Robinson contraption with "I've got too much time on my hands" written on it, and nobody asks me any questions. Well, it's London, isn't it. They get people who spraypaint themselves silver and do silly walks up and down the South Bank all day, and that doesn't raise too many eyebrows. Someone carting their Omni-Plac down the Jubilee line is probably considered normal.
5.35pm. I found my way out of Westminster tube station, and crossed the road onto Parliament Square. This turned out to have been an insanely lucky maneouvre, as I just caught a lull in traffic between traffic light changes. There aren't any pedestrian crossings to the Square, so that should have been a lot harder than it was. But anyway, no sooner have I set foot on the grass than people are gazing in wonderment at this fine example of MDF and gaffer tape. Within five minutes, I'd had my picture taken many times, and given an interview to some guys with a video camera from LSE (I never did gather whether that meant London School of Economics, London Stock Exchange, or something else entirely).
After all that, Mark Thomas himself walked over, accompanied by a bloke wielding some sort of high-tech audio recording device. "Can you talk to us for Radio 4?" We talked for a minute or so about the contraption. At least, I think that's how long it was. I can't remember much of the conversation, other than Mark explaining to what may, in weeks or months to come, be a Radio 4 audience, "it's about three or four feet high, and it's made out of MDF, and it looks like you can change what it says." I showed him how it operated, read out a few of the slogans, mentioned that I'd built it over the weekend, and had a brief discussion on why a house price boom is a good thing (mutual conclusion: it isn't). I don't actually remember if I showed him the "I've got too much time on my hands" one, as a universal explanation for the whole thing, but I do remember that it got stuck for the first of many times that evening.
It was around this point that the base platform of the placard (the bit that allows it to stand freely) broke. Still, that was the least important of the three bits of wood (the other two being the post and the placard itself). Then Jon and Phil turned up, having finally worked out how to cross the road into Parliament Square from Westminster tube station. (Incidentally, the trick is to either wait for a lull in the traffic coming past the east side, or to cross over on Parliament Street, onto a traffic island, then wait for the lights to turn red so you can continue to the Square.) Phil mentioned, as the Omni-Plac's scroll got stuck again, that the phrase "I've got a paper jam" wouldn't normally be heard at a political demonstration. They stayed for about a quarter of an hour, before deciding that this political activism lark is all very well, but there's a pub round the corner, and they didn't have permission to demonstrate anyway.
I never thought I'd be standing on the pavement of Parliament Square while Big Ben chimed six, waving a placard reading "Giant cuckoos for Big Ben!" to the assembled demonstrators and to passing cars (some of whom gave a cheery thumbs-up in support), but there I was. That particular slogan, by the way, was easily the most popular one of the evening, followed by the "I've got far too much time on my hands" one. Standing on the pavement, enthusiastically waving a placard saying "I've got far too much time on my hands", while other demonstrators campaigned for peace only metres away, is another of those little surrealities.
Many thanks to all the other demonstrators, who, unlike me, had remembered to bring sellotape. The roll of paper tore a few times, possibly due to cranking the handles too quickly, but probably due to "I built this over the weekend" workmanship.
Other highlights included: the demonstrator who wanted to rationalise pi, and Brian Haw's demonstration hoarding. Brian Haw has been in Parliament Square for six years now. Why? Perhaps he's still not managed to cross the road yet.
More pictures at http://greem.co.uk/pics/socpa_demo/.
USA
27th October 2006I go away on holiday, with family, to New York for five days. Upon my return this very morning, I notice that my Nailing Jelly To The Wall page has been linked somewhere, and had eighteen thousand visits in my absence, where normally it gets about eighty a week. A lot of these visitors are from across the pond, and expressed confusion about my use of the word "jelly". I've added an explanatory note to the page, which should clear things up.
So yes, the USA. Firstly, I'd like the debunk the myth that that little card they make you fill in, in which they ask you whether the purpose of your visit to the US is to commit nefarious deeds, is a myth. It's not a myth; I even took a picture of it as proof. At the question marked "are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?" the idea is that terrorists will say "Damn and blast! Foiled!" and go home. Of particular interest is this bit (my emphasis) "Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offense or crime involving..." Erm, presumption of what?
The roads in New York City are probably its best feature. For the most part, they are laid out in a big grid. Streets run from west to east, and Avenues from north to south. They are (mostly) numbered, so you can work your way from one place to another by simply using the street names as co-ordinates, e.g. "forty-second and fifth". It also means it's almost impossible to get lost, as a street's location can be determined from its name. One of the exceptions is Broadway, which has such an inflated sense of self-importance that it just cuts across the city in an almost-but-not-quite-straight diagonal line from southeast to northwest, leaving a throng of theatres scattered in its wake.
Road signs are very different from what we're used to in the UK: take, for example, this signpost, which conveys information of approximately equal utility with the Tannoy announcers at the start of the film Airplane. There is no parking in the red zone; it makes that pretty clear. Then it tells you to stop on the red signal, and never to stop at any time. In addition, there are signs we don't get in this country: this one means "no fraction cancelling until the next exit", I only took a photograph of this one because from the right angle it looks like it's ridiculously big and partly hidden behind a building, and this one indicates that a comedian called Jimmy has opened up a coffee business.
Of course, no set of photographs of New York would be complete without the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.
(So thank goodness we got those out of the way.)
The top floor of the Empire State Building affords tourists with splendid views of New York for miles around. Accordingly, this sign draws disabled visitors' attention to the existence of "viewing periscopes" with which they can better appreciate this magnificent view. The same message is given in Braille underneath, for no other apparent reason than to taunt blind people.
Bad Drivers: A Spotter's Guide
23rd September 2006Last week I was in London to see Phil. We drove there. Here is a short list, by no means exhaustive, of the kind of motorists one is likely to meet on the roads, particularly in our great capital.
The Euclidean Geometrician
Habitat: Normally found on roundabouts.
Notes: He knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and minor inconveniences like the presence of other vehicles are not going to convince him otherwise. If faith in his unshakeable belief is challenged by another car in his path, he will apply the horn until the problem corrects itself.
Varieties: Closely related to the Surprise Lane Blocker, whose mission in life is to undertake you on the roundabout and sit behind and to the left of you at about eight-o'clock, in order to prevent you from exiting the roundabout.I Only Know One Speed
Habitat: Not usually found in cities, but more common in rural areas.
Notes: This motorist's vehicle has a very unusual manufacturing defect that prevents it from travelling at any speed other than 45 mph, regardless of whether it's a national speed limit road or a thirty limit. These are almost exclusively drivers of more advanced years; the more optimistic of predictions suggest that IOKOSes could be as little as two decades from extinction.Manoeuvre-Signal-Mirror
Habitat: Everywhere.
Notes: This motorist uses his indicators to inform other road users what manoeuvre he's just made, in case they missed it.The Bumper Humper
Habitat: Very common in London, but also abundant elsewhere.
Notes: No, it's not a sexual euphemism. Probably the most well-known of all irritating motorists. When travelling behind you, this person tries to gain an extra few feet on his journey by closing the gap in front of him and hanging on to your bumper.
Varieties: One variety of this species is the Peek-A-Boo driver - he makes his home a few feet behind your vehicle, occasionally moving out to the right for a split second to see if the road ahead is clear for an overtake, before darting in again for shelter.The Fog Hallucinator
Habitat: Often found near towns.
Notes: If this is you, go and read rule 211 of the Highway Code before proceeding. The Fog Hallucinator is blissfully unaware that the use of fog lights in good visibility is dangerous and illegal (Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations 1989, regulations 25 and 27), and probably thinks they're just there for show. Occasionally, you see this driver with fog lights on and headlights off.The Moron-By-Proxy
Habitat: Everywhere, but mostly in towns and cities.
Notes: Not content with being a moron himself by exceeding speed limits and ignoring Give Way lines causing other traffic to have to slow down, this motorist gets annoyed if drivers in front of him fail to show the same degree of moronic driving and so delay him through their respect for the rules of the road. When waiting to turn right at a junction, failure to accelerate from nought to thirty in half a second and slot into the tiny gap that has just presented itself will result in this person using his horn and lights to try to push you along your way by the sheer force of sound waves and photons.
Distinctive call: A mouthed "COME ON!" accompanied by one of many hand gestures.
Advice: The universally-accepted response to this driver's characteristic antics is to slow down, or, if stationary, remain so for longer.I Think I'll Park... Here
Habitat: Residential areas.
Notes: This driver, when faced with an empty street on which to park, will choose the one spot which blocks another car from exiting its driveway. An ordinary member of the public, when asked to move from this ridiculous location, would then be expected to move their car. However, the sort of person with the mentality to park in front of someone's drive is the same sort of person to point out that in fact, because you haven't got a drop-kerb, it's perfectly OK to block your car into its driveway.
Example: Drive-Blocker photographed in May 2005.
Cake or Death?
14th August 2006Having just returned from a two-week holiday in various parts of Scotland's Great Glen and the Caledonian Canal, I thought I'd make the first blitherance for months to prattle about it.
Firstly, let's get the statutory minimum drivel about the weather out of the way; mainly dull and overcast with light showers and occasional sun. Yes, Scotland does indeed have a number of sunny days in a year, and we were lucky enough to catch both of them.
At some point on our travels we stumbled across a hotel near Invergarry Castle. We moored the boat we'd hired at the side of the loch, and set off into the nearby woodland, following a winding footpath round the forest, which wouldn't have looked out of place in a text adventure. This restaurant/hotel at Invergarry was said to do a rather good cream tea with scones, tea and cake, and so at a fork in the path ("There is a fork in the path here. You can retreat back down the path to the west. The hotel that vends cream teas is up a path to the east. A forbidding path leads to the north. You are carrying: a pen; a chunk of driftwood.") I thought that the construction of a makeshift sign was in order.
Oh, and as far as obscure references go, that's nothing. This blitherance gets much worse. Anyway, when we found the place, you can see what I mean about it looking like something straight out of an interactive fiction game.
A huge Victorian building with windows in random places, giving the vague impression that at least one of them is in a bricked-up room with a skeleton in it. When we stepped inside, we walked through what appeared to be a library, with bookshelves covering every wall. Had I given the right book an inquisitive tug, a secret passage would probably have flung open. As far as I could see, there were no holes leading down into the darkness with electric torches having been conveniently abandoned close by, nor was there an oval pool table with a post in the middle, and I managed to navigate through the rooms without a huge fierce green snake barring my way. All of these artifacts were conspicuous by their absence.
So, we had our tea and scones and cake, and had a look round the exterior of the building. I noticed that there was a clump of grass growing out of a gravel path, but assumed that the gardener was too busy planting a group of trees in an intricate shape on a grid to bother with removing it.
Moving away from Victorian mansions and references to text games that will be
lost on most of the readership (perhaps even all three of you), I also learnt a
bit of Gaelic. Signs in the Scottish Desert Highlands are often
given in Gaelic and English. To obtain the Gaelic translation of a Scots place
name, simply add random silent letters.
And finally, since boating along the Caledonian Canal is apparently a popular pastime among holidaymakers, British Waterways were kind enough to provide facilities such as showers and launderettes along the route. They also provided clumsily-worded refuse points into which difficult customers can be conveniently inserted.
Tamper-proof screws: Revenge!
25th May 2006A while ago I posted a rant about the manufacturers of consumer electronics insisting upon the use of non-standard screws, with the result that it is difficult to gain access to devices without resorting to destructive means. Incidentally, it has since been pointed out to me that Torx screws (the six-pointed star) are used for technical reasons and not for annoyance — they are easier for automatic machinery to screw in. However, Torx screws don't really pose too much of a problem; you can usually undo those with careful application of the right size of flathead screwdriver.
This still doesn't excuse the use of screws that are like a Torx screw or Allen-key screw, but have a hulking great pillar in the middle. Nor does it excuse the use of any other bizarre shape which cannot easily be unscrewed with standard screwdrivers. HOWEVER, I now have a new weapon in the fight against control-freak manufacturers. 62 weapons, to be precise. I have purchased, at the cost of £19.99 from Maplin, this:
From the humble flathead and Philips screws, through the common but irritating Pozidrive, hexagonal-with-a-pillar (metric and imperial) and Torx-with-a-pillar screws, to the esoteric "I've-never-come-across-these-but-you-never-know" territory of the two-holed, triangular and twelve-pointed star screws — they all bow down before this beast of a screwdriver set. Never again will I have to respond to a manufacturer's pronouncement that "no, we've decided that you aren't allowed to open up this device that you have bought and paid for" with appropriate application of a hacksaw.
P.S. Sorry Growler, but there are no five-pointed star screwdrivers. Even this almighty screwdriver set is not enough to counter the sheer force of pig-headed perversity dealt out in spades by Sony in their Vaios. Meanwhile, following the shock revelation a few weeks ago that there are things even Doctor Who's sonic screwdriver can't open, here's a sneak preview of next week's episode....
Let's spend time and effort making it difficult to get in and out of our cars.
18th March 2006With the redstore business all neatly sewn up in a bag (they sent me a new hard drive, and this one actually appears to work), it's time to turn my attention to something else.
Living 57 miles from my place of work means I have to have some reliable means of transport between there and here. Accordingly, I have use of a 1993 Ford Fiesta, which has done 95,000 miles. Now, a vehicle in which you need to keep a can of WD-40 ready in the glove compartment at all times is hardly the most reliable and trustworthy of automobiles. So, it's time to get a new car. This involves paying visits to the various dealerships in the surrounding area, but with the notable exception of this one, for reasons which ought to be obvious.
So, what am I looking for in a car? First and foremost, it has to have rear doors. I know that this sounds a rather unusual choice for a first-and-foremost criterion, and that I'm nearly always the only person in my car, but it's the principle. "I've got an idea! I'll make a car with rear seats but with no sane means of accessing them, so that all the vehicle's occupants have to get in and out in a particular order, turning the front passenger into a human barricade," an engineer at a car design plant said, before turning his attention to some other inventions of his which included flickery LED rear lights and novelty ringtones. This is the sort of person whom you'd meet on the street shoving a clipboard in your face, deliberately getting in your way, and asking if you'd take some time to donate to the Perversely Annoying Prats Association. Any vehicle in which you have to do all that musical chairs and buggering about with the seat in order to accommodate a rear passenger does not make my shortlist.
A diesel car would be preferable; by all accounts, newer diesel engines are more prone to working and have a much longer life than their petrol counterparts. The fuel economy is also very good, and allegedly outweighs the four pence per litre difference in the price of diesel compared to petrol. The Fiesta, on a good day, does about 10 miles to the litre1. Diesel engines, from my bare minimum research on the subject, get closer to 13 miles to the litre2. Diesels aren't exactly renowned for their performance, but being the driver of a 1.1 litre Fiesta I don't have very high expectations in that department anyway.
One constant, whatever I go for, is that the insurance quote is very likely to be measured in limbs, thanks to the "you're under 25 and driving, therefore you must be a crazed boy racer" effect. This leads me onto some of the more concerning items you find in insurance policy handbooks, including that in the event of a claim, "you must not: admit the accident was your fault; attempt to negotiate the settlement of the claim unless we have given you our written permission by letter or email" and "we are entitled to: conduct the defence or settlement of any claim on your behalf; take legal action over any claim in your name or the name of any person insured on the policy for our own benefit; admit negligence for any accident or claim on your behalf." A clause like "You agree that we are entitled to use you, your friends and your family as our sex slaves whenever we so choose, and you will pay us for the privilege and express your thanks after the event with the phrase 'thank you sir, may I have another?'" wouldn't look out of place in this document.
1. That's 45 miles to the gallon. Fuel is measured in litres, and distance
in miles, so don't you think that miles per litre is a much more convenient
unit than miles per gallon? OK, it's not terribly consistent, but working out
fuel consumption from the readings on the petrol pump and on your milometer is
easier without having to multiply by 4.5.
2. which is 59 miles to the gallon.
Woo yay!
28th February 2006Yay indeed! After months of ranting about such trivia as fonts and/or ITV1 on this page, I finally have something I can legitimately complain about! Up to the top of SNAFU I go again, but this time with a worthwhile grievance!
When I need a new piece of computer hardware, I usually pop along to redstore, as I have done since about 1999. In January, I decided to buy a second hard drive. So, I went along to this erstwhile honest and reputable example of a computer component purveyor and ordered one. It arrived, I installed it, and within two days it died, emitting crunch-squeak sounds and refusing to do anything useful. So, I went along to their helpful product returns form and attempted to fill it in. One problem immediately presented itself: the fourth column asks for a "detailed fault description", but only allows a maximum of fifty characters to be entered. So I typed "It goes 'crunch- squeak'" in it. Luckily, they provided a "Comments" box with no limit, into which I took the welcome opportunity to spout the following.
What genius! A column on your returns form marked "Detailed Fault Description" which only allows 50 characters to be entered. I couldn't have thought of that myself. Evidently there is some evil genius at work. Fortuitous, then, that someone had the presence of mind to provide this "Comments" box, to which I might commit the remainder of my narrative, which as you can see from my entry in the risibly meagre box provided has had to be brutally cut short and summarised to encapsulate the general problem within the space allowed. I ordered a 120GB Maxtor drive from your establishment this week, and installed it on Thursday. By Saturday evening it was emitting sounds I can only describe (admittedly with the help of a thesaurus) as "malevolently portentous". I have attempted a transcription of the unit's death throes in your "Detailed Fault Description" column, although to fully appreciate the finer subtleties of its singular exclamations, I would suggest you plug it in and have a listen. The best approximation I can come up with, unfettered by the ridiculous shackles of a fifty-character limit, is that it sounds like someone cleaning your windows while listening to a percussion ensemble on a personal stereo. The drive is no longer detected by the BIOS; indeed, its initial IDE drive detection stage hangs if the device is connected. This would suggest that the drive truly is as dead as the proverbial. I trust you share my view that 48 hours is a pretty poor show for the lifetime of a hard drive; after all, it's even less than the number of characters allowed in your fault description box. Kindest regards, Graeme Cole.
Yeah, I know, I know. I was bored. Anyway, they responded a few days later with an automatically-generated e-mail giving me a returns number and asking me to return the drive. All well and good. We can't blame redstore for this, as occasionally drives die off early if there's been some unfortunate defect in manufacturing. After two weeks I hadn't heard from them, so I chased them up and was told that they'd sent an e-mail to an address I haven't used for years, a fact of which I advised redstore some time ago. Anyway, this e-mail asked me if I'd accept a similar model as a replacement. This turned out to be the next model up, so I was naturally happy for this to go ahead. So, they sent me a replacement hard drive, and everyone was happy.
Unfortunately, this drive they sent to replace the one that died after less than a week died after less than a week. I/O errors clattered forth as Linux tried its damnedest to boot. No incessant crunch-squeak this time, just a lack of any useful work on its part.
So, another returns form, another returns number, and another £3.18 to send the thing back to them. I asked them if they could replace it with an equivalent drive of a different brand this time (in case the problem was in a bad batch of the brand I had bought), and offered to pay the difference in price.
What landed in my inbox this evening was an e-mail entitled "item warranty void". Not a good start. The heading "EQUIPMENT RETURN ERROR" didn't bode well either. "Our supplier's [sic] are very thorough in inspecting items for damage", it continued, with a hint of accusation. "The item(s) received," it said, eventually getting to the point, "have been found in damaged condition." Yes, that's rather why I returned it to them. But then:
Here, by the way, is the full message. What it amounts to is this. "The drive has been dropped, therefore we can't claim our money back from the manufacturer, therefore it's financially convenient to assume that you dropped it."The drop gaps on the drive have been crushed in. This happens when the drive is dropped and they are put there by the maunfacturer to ensure goods are not sent back that have been dropped.
Incorrect, I'm afraid. I didn't drop it. In fact I barely touched it other than to remove it from its packaging, install it, and remove it a few days later when it broke. Now, if I didn't drop it, and it wasn't damaged in transit (it was in an anti-static bag in a bubble-wrap-lined jiffy-bag) I think it a lot more likely that someone, somewhere, dropped a crate of hard drives, picked one up, shook it, heard no audible rattling, and decided "they'll be all right" before continuing on their merry way. So, time to get the thesaurus again and pen a reply e-mail. But wait!
I can't think of any reason they insist on fax, other than that many people, myself included, do not have a fax machine, and they want to avoid complaints. I can't think of any reason why our conversation can't be conducted over e-mail, so I'm going to do that. Possibly with an "I will be following this e-mail up with a telephone call" grenade in there for good effect.Should you have any queries, please send them BY FAX to enable a quick and detailed response. Please QUOTE the RMA reference on all correspondance [sic].
In the meantime, suggestions for a new computer hardware supplier to whom to give my custom are welcome. At least, they would be if I had any means of letting you send comments to a static HTML page, which I don't. So either send your recommendation to me by telepathy, or via IRC or in person, since the chances are that if you're reading this you know me personally anyway.
Inspector Morose
28th January 2006I've recently been watching ITV's repeats of Inspector Morse on Saturday afternoons. This was a fine series, in complete contrast with the ratings-grabbing fodder ITV serves up now. Accordingly, ITV has done its level best to ruin it.
Let me explain what I mean. If you've recently watched ITV (and this is where you all say "yes, of course I've watched it recently. I must have. Have I? No, wait, I haven't.") you'll know that the closing credits of all their programmes are exactly the same format. Same font (don't worry, it's only Helvetica), same size, same whirly duochromatic background. This doesn't just apply to new programmes; old shows like Morse, which have perfectly respectable closing credits, have had them unaccountably replaced with the "new-look" ones. Why do they do this? It can't be an easy task to have someone read the original closing credits of every show they broadcast, type them word-for-word into their new template and create a new closing credit sequence. It seems such a pointless exercise.
Incidentally, have a look at this PDF of guidelines for ITV closing credits, particularly the last page. It even includes rules on how telephone numbers should be read out (they have to say "oh", not "zero"). Rule 9.5 is rather interesting. "Presenters should not use 'after the break' terminology. By doing so, it is an encouragement to the viewer to channel-hop. Instead 'teaser' phrases such as 'coming up...' or 'in just a moment...' create more immediacy and do not give such a strong signal to the viewer that it is safe to look elsewhere."
Casting aside the easy cop-out explanation involving ITV's relentless drive to strip all their programmes of every last scrap of their own identity and individuality, I will charitably assume that they just want to cut the length of the closing credits of some programmes. For example, the original full-length Morse credits ran to two or three minutes, which eats into valuable advertising time. It makes better economic sense to cut them to about thirty seconds by removing all the extraneous detail. Why this can't be done by simply editing the original credits sequence isn't immediately apparent.
OK, so I can come up with an explanation for the carpet-bomb rebranding of credits. It's not a totally satisfactory one, but it's a stab. Now let us turn our attention to more of ITV's antics.
When I was watching last week's Morse, I already knew that I'd seen it before. Fair enough, we can't blame ITV for that. However, I did notice that certain scenes had had bits cut out from when I last watched the episode. Not content with replacing the closing credits to save time, they'd also hacked some scenes to bits to save another few minutes. Explanation? Well, to be fair, they didn't cut anything that was vitally important to the story, and again, there's the explanation that they had to fit the programme into an awkward early-afternoon slot, and the only other option was (gasp) to have shorter advert breaks. So we'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
However. There is one more thing. ITV's final piece of meddling involves something so utterly pointless that I really can't think of any reason, even one that ITV might conceivably come up with, for its execution. They've also meddled with the opening credits of the old episodes. On Morse, these consist of white captions on a black background, interspersed throughout the opening few minutes of the programme. What could they possibly do with that? Well, they've replaced these credits with the exact same credits, in (as far as I can see) the exact same places, but in a different font. Luckily, it's not Arial. It looks like someone at ITV selected the closest font to the original in the (presumably scant) range available.
Original credit |
Credit after pointless Lucasian meddling |
They've not saved any time doing this, but presumably they paid someone to sit down and make this change. So, why on earth have they done it? What moron at ITV decided to come out with "hey, this old Morse episode, can we strip out the opening credits and put them back in a different font? I consider this a worthwhile and useful exercise, and not at all a complete waste of everybody's time comparable to lava mining."
So, I call on all producers to make their programmes' credits ITV-proof. What do I mean? I mean, take the PDF I've linked to above, and find creative ways of bending the rules. Scroll the credits along the bottom of the screen during the last minute of the programme, so they can't cut them without removing content. Deliberately pronounce the number 0 as "zero", "nought", or if you really want to confuse people, "cipher". Admittedly, the above ideas all break the rules rather than bending them. However, it appears there are no restrictions on opening credits, so put all the credits at the start of the programme, and end it without any credits, like Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail did. But remember to superimpose the captions directly onto the picture and not put them on a black background, otherwise the ITV-imps will pounce and devour it.
UPDATE: I found a feedback page on ITV's website, and used it to send them the following comment.
I have been watching your repeats of Inspector Morse on ITV1 on Saturday afternoons, and I noticed that some aspects are not as I recall them to be. When I checked the episodes you broadcast against some I have on DVD, I realised that the opening credits have been altered. The text is the same, but the font in which it is printed is different. I can't think of any reason why ITV would go through all the old Morse episodes and change the font of the opening credits, but clearly that's what's happened. Why?
To their credit, they responded promptly, but less to their credit, their response was:
Your comments have been noted. We have just rebranded the channels as you may have noticed there are new idents with new fonts. Hope that helps. DUTY OFFICE-WA
Now, for those who don't know, an ident is a short sequence in between programmes that announces what channel you're watching, and what programme is coming up. For example, BBC1 has idents involving dancers and skateboarders wearing red, and BBC2 has its famous '2' logo. The ITV "Duty Office" clearly didn't even read my comment. I wasn't talking about the idents, I was talking about the opening credits of a programme. Ah well, let's try again.
Thank you for your prompt response, but in my comment I was referring to
the opening credits of Inspector Morse ("John Thaw as Chief Inspector
Morse" etc), rather than the ITV idents. Or is it the case that your
rebranding includes what seems to me to be the somewhat unnecessary step
of replacing programmes' opening credits?
--
Graeme Cole
The Duty Office helpfully responded:
Some of the older programme introductions have also got a new look. DUTY OFFICE-WA
No real mention of why. Maybe I'm missing some crucial piece of knowledge about branding and typography, but I don't see any reason why the font on the right-hand picture above is any more or less appealing than the one on the left. Anyway, aren't we missing the point here? The real point is that it's only a credit in a programme filmed over a decade ago. It imparts all necessary information irrespective of which font it's in. Both are equally clear, and as far as I can see, equally suited to the task. So why go out of your way to give it a "new look"?
Incidentally, before today's Morse, I watched Poirot, which is the other worthwhile ITV programme. It also was an old episode, with those animated line-drawn titles (the ones they don't use on new Poirot episodes, presumably because they don't look "new" enough) completely unchanged. Why did they leave Poirot alone, but hack about with Morse? Well. After the opening titles to Poirot, they had opening credits. But instead of putting the credits on their own black background like Morse, the credits were simply captions superimposed onto the bottom of the picture. Of course, ITV couldn't easily change those without cutting content, and perhaps they didn't like the idea of changing the title sequence to some "new look" but leaving the font of the opening credits unchanged. So the makers of that Poirot episode had inadvertently ITV-proofed their opening credits.
Fonts
13th January 2006You find it on shop fronts. You find it on notices. You find it in television captions and cash machine keypads. It's even found its way onto a few road signs. Yes. I'm talking about the relentless encroachment of Arial into our environment.
It's one of the most popular sans-serif fonts to be shipped with MS Windows, if not the most popular. Microsoft products will usually select Arial for you as a default when you type an e-mail or a document. As a result, those notices put up in shops and pubs on bits of laminated card are done in Arial, because that's the font that happened to be selected whenever the person who made the notice fired up their application.
Arial is shipped with Microsoft products because they didn't want to pay the licensing fees for Helvetica, which is the sans-serif font that's been around since the middle of the last century, and is the correct font to use.
Look at the following two specimens. One of them is the well-respected Helvetica that's been used for all sorts of purposes since the fifties. The other one is Arial, the cheap knock-off of Helvetica that's clearly inferior. Now, I've been kind and selected the characters that show the differences between the two fonts quite well. If you're at all sane, one of them looks very respectable and the other should look very familiar to you as the overused pretender. Try and identify which.
If you didn't spot that the top one is Helvetica and the bottom one is Arial, and you can't see any significant difference between the two, then stop reading this blitherance. It'll just read like the frothings of a deranged madman. But if, for some unfathomable reason, you prefer the bottom one to the top one, then you're beyond saving. We'll agree to disagree. It's a free country1, and you're entitled to your opinion, but I'm afraid it's wrong. Off you go.
1. Well, this one is, anyway. I don't know about yours.
Everyone knows Arial. It's everywhere. It is the easiest way for a signwriter or designer to say "I have no imagination. I rattled off this advert/sign/notice in MS Word." But Arial isn't just limited to shop notices on laminated paper, or newspaper advert headings. Oh no. It has started to work its way onto British road signs.
For those who don't know, the font used on British road signs is imaginatively enough called Transport. (It actually comes in two flavours, Transport Medium and Transport Heavy, the latter being used for black-on-white text, but that's not important.) A typical sign goes like this:
We all recognise this font. It was presumably chosen because it's easy to read quickly and doesn't offend the eyes. It's been used on our signs since 1963. However, on my way to work, I have noticed some worrying trends. There is a sign for the B4449 which looks like this.
Not only does the sign contain Arial, flying in the face of over forty years of established convention in favour of the convenience of using the font your Microsoft application has pre-selected for you, but it isn't even consistent! I can only guess that they ran out of numbers half way through making the sign.
There's another sign, too. It's one of those yellow roadworks information signs that tell you between what dates and times roadworks will be happening. It's all in Arial. Every last character. And they showed the time as 22-00 instead of 22:00 or 22.00. It's on the A415-A34 roundabout, which is a piece of information that will mean nothing to you unless you live in Oxfordshire.
It's the same with the new variable-message matrix signs on the M4. Not the little ones on the central reservation, they've been there for decades. Not the ones with a little rectangular window for each character. I mean the ones that are just one big oblong of LEDs, so it could theoretically do graphics. It looks like this:
You really can't take that kind of warning seriously if it's in Arial.
I don't know what exactly it is about Arial that just makes it look cheap, overused and generally inferior. Maybe it's the fact that the ends of the strokes in some of the characters aren't nicely squared off horizontally or vertically, but half-heartedly hacked off at some arbitrary angle. For instance, compare the capital C of the two fonts. Or maybe it's just that it's used so often because people can't be bothered to pick an alternative. Perhaps if we square off the strokes, and of course crop the 1's duck-bill to something more sensible, it'll be a bit less offensive. In the meantime, next time you're about to make a sign or poster or notice or anything, select a proper font!
It's so good, I put my hacksaw on it
27th December 2005In the annual exchange of Christmas gift items, I presented my brother with a George Foreman Grill. I am therefore reminded of the one I received for Christmas a couple of years ago, which isn't technically a George but a similar appliance.
What that picture does not record, however, is that it broke horribly about six months later, in summer 2004. Plugging it into a wall socket would cause the RCD in the fusebox to trip, even, and this is the baffling part, when the socket's switch wasn't turned on. Now, I didn't consider this a major crisis. Consumer electronics aren't perfect, and sometimes they break. So, suspecting that the appliance was leaking current to earth, I found some screwdrivers with the intention of opening up the cooking device and having a look inside.
I had Phillips screwdrivers, flat head screwdrivers, and even some Allen keys somewhere. However, the screws on the non-George were shaped, to the best of my recollection, like this.
Got that? A circular screw head, with a hexagonal depression. This would have been perfect for something like an Allen key, or even, at a push, a flathead screwdriver. Unfortunately, the silly little circular pillar in the middle of this hexagonal indentation thwarted both tools. Tefal didn't even have the decency to use screws I've ever seen before (a favourite for non-standard screws is the Torx head), let alone ones that standard screwdrivers fit into. In the end, I had to take a hacksaw blade to the screw head, severing the infernal nodule, to get the thing open. I still didn't find the fault, though. It wasn't the grill breaking down that I had a problem with, it was the manufacturer's use of these silly screws.
Now, I know this phenomenon is not limited to the Tefal brand of devices. Many times in the past I've come across non-standard screws on other appliances. However, the question that must be asked of these manufacturers is: Why?
It's not as if these allegedly tamper-resistant screws are cheaper to make; after all, I would have thought that the mass-produced cross-head and flat-head screws cost less to buy than the bespoke ones as depicted above. It's not as if there's any technical advantage to the non-standard screws, either. The only reason I can come up with is that certain manufacturers take some perverse delight in being actively annoying to their customers. It can't be that they don't want their customers to disassemble it, because anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that if someone wants to do so, the application of a hacksaw will easily, if a little inconveniently, accomplish this task.
Recruitment agency in "helpful" shock
4th November 2005And now, some quick backpedalling on my previous blitherance as a recruitment agency gets me a job. Who'd have thought it.
Yes, there exist recruiters who have the common sense to e-mail you concrete details of actual vacancies rather than just vaguely hinting about their existence.
Hi $NAME, your skills are a good match
19th October 2005I submitted my CV to a certain recruitment agency multiplexer whose name rhymes with "Gobshite". I even had to convert my PDF CV to plain text so their system would accept it. The result so far has been some e-mails from recruitment agencies, all containing a non-committal, over-generalised spiel about how my skills and/or qualifications may or may not match one or more of their available positions. And they try so hard to make them seem like they're not just generated automatically.
Recruitment agencies, then, appear to be a means of making what should be a fairly straightforward task of getting a candidate at point A into a suitable vacancy at point B as difficult and inconvenient as possible. Four "people" representing said organisations have e-mailed me asking for a contact telephone number. This is the sort of level we're dealing with here; they contact you using a perfectly serviceable mode of communication asking for a way to communicate with you.
That isn't to say they're useless. On the contrary, by scanning the adverts on agencies' web sites (without having signed up to the agency), you can often work out what company they're talking about by googling key phrases, and apply to the employer directly.
Update: OK, a recruitment agency has bucked the trend and sent me details of actual vacancies by e-mail. Fair enough, I'll go with them.
Can I have a Word?
27th September 2005"C developer for Linux/Unix required. Please send your MS Word CV to..."
No, I don't have Word. Many of the potential respondents to that particular advert won't. Instead, their CV will conform to a well-known portable document format that can be read by programs available for all operating systems, not just those which happen to be produced in Redmond. I am of course referring to PDF, which by the way stands for Portable Document Format. That's what it's for.
Cat (quick reference)
14th July 2005With graduation over, it is now time to formulate some sort of answer to the question which has been asked of me with increasing frequency over the past few weeks, "what are you going to do now?" Accordingly, I have drawn up a CV. "Oh dear," said Jon, "your CV is only a page."
Now, there are a number of websites that claim to help with CVs, and they all say the same thing. They give indispensible advice such as "check it for spelling mistakes", "don't use txt spk", "don't call your prospective employer a raving ninny", and so on. They also say that you should cram it full of society involvements and part-time work done over the holidays, which I didn't do. Instead of "I was president of this society, vice president of that society and co-ordinator-in-chief of the other society", all I can put is "I've always got a pen." However, I decided to make my CV stretch to two pages anyway, by adding some filler material. Like this.
Bloody cruciverbalists.
24th June 2005
Final score
85.2% this year, 78.8% overall. No complaints from me. My lowest mark was in Silly Compulsory Management Module (61%), but that wasn't really unexpected.And now, a little less pointing at oneself shouting "I rock". Here is a short FAQ about some of our recent barbecues. An FA(barbe)Q, if you will.
Q. I understand a recent barbecue involved the fire brigade.
As the readership of this site will be aware, since you were either all here at the time or have been told of it through our wonderful interweb, on the 4th of June we had a barbecue. After a visit to the pub, this turned into a meeting of pyromaniacs anonymous by certain people who will remain both. Events occurred which resulted in the unexpected arrival of two fire engines, whose crews had had a report of a house fire. The fireman seemed rather disappointed to arrive with two fire engines only to discover a bonfire. Water buckets were upended onto the fire, and the fire engines departed.
Q. I understand the barbecue got smashed to bits.
Well, some of us tried to forge a bent piece of metal into, presumably, a bent piece of metal, by using the bricks of the barbecue as an anvil. Some of the barbecue's top layer bricks were falling off anyway, and this impromptu ironmongery didn't help matters. In all, about ten bricks (of a hundred or so) either fell out or disintegrated. I "mended" it and made some warning signs. Some of the cement even went between the bricks, and 24 hours after laying them, only two bricks had come loose. If you can't read the signs, they say "no undue faith in my bricklaying ability" and "Leamington has perfectly adequate street lighting". Yes, that's a tower of flame coming from the barbecue, thank you, not a yellow tree.
The signs are printed out on paper (which burns), stuck to a piece of wood (which also burns) and laminated with cling film to protect it from the elements (well, earth, wind and water — what more do you want?). Guess where the first sign ended up when the barbecue was next lit.
Q. That wasn't a very long FAbarbeQ.
No. Nor, strictly speaking, did you ask any questions. Now badger off.
Nailing jelly to the wall
"Nailing jelly to the wall" is an expression used to describe a very hard or impossible whack-a-mole style task. For example, "tidying the house while Mike is in it is like nailing jelly to the wall." However, after the exams I had some free time, so I decided to test if this proverb was scientifically sound. See the experiment writeup here.Calm down dear, it's only a wavelet transform!
My last piece of coursework (with the exception of the group project) was an assignment about image processing for CS403 Distributed Multimedia Systems. If you know what a Discrete Wavelet Transform is, and how the LBG vector quantisation algorithm works, then that's what it was about. If you don't, then try your best to keep it that way. The reason why I mention this assignment is that I had a lot of fun with it. I don't mean the actual assignment matter, of course, but the extra things I put in.
In February, the assignment was handed out. It said that the experiments were to be completed in MATLAB, but the lecturer mentioned, in passing, that we could do it in C if we preferred, at which point the assignment instantly got about 400% more interesting. The deadline was the 25th of April.
Now, it so happened that other deadlines existed as well. The 30,000-word group project report was due on the 22nd of April, and the presentation of the project was on the 26th. So, there was an individual assignment due within a week of two major group assignments. There are two recognised ways of dealing with this.
Method A
Do the image processing assignment far in advance to get it out of the way. Then, when the group assignments have to be done in late April, there's one less thing to worry about.
Method BAs you know, I'm very much in the 'A' camp. However, it seems that almost everyone else in the world is in the 'B' camp. It's for this reason that I decided to start the assignment extra-early (i.e. in February) so that I could give the group report my undivided attention when the April term started.
Deadline-driven evaluation. Wait until the number of days to the deadline are down to single figures, then complain that you have an intolerably high workload this week.
I finished the code some time in March. I then got a little carried away. For example, briefly examine this output. You don't need to understand what it means, but you probably picked up on the fact that it's rather dull. So, if you run my assignment with the --cricket option, you get this instead. The number of runs corresponds to the distortion (high runs = low distortion, it's an inverse square thing) and the number of wickets is roughly proportional to the number of stranded codewords (I won't blither about what those are, but they're not terribly good).
Pleased with this achievement, with the deadline still weeks away, I decided to write a "silly effects" module. By repeated application of the -s option (or, equivalently, --silly) the original Lena image can be transformed using effects such as "block puzzle" or "image folded in half while ink still wet". By popular demand (i.e., more than one person persuaded me), I left these features in when submitting the code. Either the assessors liked the extra features, or (much more likely) they didn't notice them, as my mark for that module wasn't bad.
There was also a written component to the assignment, which I mention only because it meant I had to go onto campus on the morning of the 25th to hand it in. When I sauntered into DCS on the morning of the deadline to do so, I wasn't surprised to find most of the terminals occupied by 'B' people finishing their coursework (or in some cases, starting it). Unfortunately, I didn't carry out my plan of walking in wearing a T-shirt reading "if you'd started this in February, you'd be home by now", because I value my internal organs. "What's that? You want me to help you with the Discrete Wavelet Transform? Sorry, it's so long since I did that..." Heh heh heh. It never gets old.
Hello world
4th June 2005The exams finished two days ago. Accordingly, many barbecues will be taking place. Because this month has essentially everything about normal student life minus everything work-related, I can finally get around to making this Mike-related update, which is added here by special request of at least two people. But before that, a short discussion about one of my exams.
As I have complained repeatedly in the past, the fourth year computer science course at Warwick has a module entitled "Engineering Business Management 1: Human Resource and Law". Why did I take this module? Because it's a core module, not an optional one. I certainly wouldn't have done so out of choice. It is also the only core module in the fourth year apart from the group project; with all the other modules, you get to pick and choose which ones you want to do.
Incidentally, this isn't the university's fault; I believe it's a requirement for any computer science course that calls itself a Master of Engineering (MEng) to have a certain minimum quota of waste-of-time modules completely unrelated to computer science.
But anyway, this exam.
The Human Resource and Law paper dealt with such riveting topics as contract law, the roles of teams in an organisation, organisational culture and change, and human resource management as a business strategy. It was also the only paper which had the following inscribed on the front:
And they did. All modules run by the Engineering department have to have the data book and graph paper provided, as a matter of policy -- even if they're in the one exam I'm doing that has no mathematical or scientific content whatsoever. Well, I thought it was funny.Only calculators approved by the School of Engineering may be used in this examination.
Graph paper and the Engineering Databook will be provided.
Now, on to this incident regarding Mike. Unfortunately, because the incident in question has already been related to a not insignificant number of people by means other than this site, it's very likely that all the people who read this page now already know the story from some means or other. But here it is, anyway.
Most descriptions of these incidents, of course, start with "I came downstairs in the morning to find...." This one is no exception. On this occasion, the state of the kitchen struck me as somewhat odd. It wasn't exactly untidy, but certain things weren't as they should have been. There were two pieces of bread sitting in the toaster. They hadn't actually been toasted, but I deduced that they had been there for some hours from their staleness. The butter was sitting on the kitchen worktop. It too had clearly been left out of the fridge for a while, as it had gone soft. Other clues were a jar of peanut butter sitting on the side, and the back door, which was wide open.
So, as this sort of situation generally demands, I went to Mike's room, knocked on the door authoritatively, strode in, launched into a tirade about him leaving the bread in the toaster and the butter on the side and the back door open, and then realised that Mike was not, in fact, in the room. He was nowhere to be found.
The fact that the kitchen had been left in such a Mary Celeste configuration suggested that Mike had been in the kitchen at some point making his breakfast. However, it was as if he'd been teleported away in the course of doing so. It took a while, but eventually the fact that the back door was open (implying that someone had left the kitchen by that route) gave us the vital clue as to what had happened.
Mike had decided to go home to Cheltenham. In a flash of genius, he had made this impulse decision in the middle of making his breakfast.
Object-oriented haircut
11th April 2005Warning: this blitherance involves the application of programming concepts to everyday life. It also has a pun. Readers with no knowledge of object-oriented programming principles (and those who have no appreciation for puns) are advised to skip this blitherance.
The procedural way of getting a haircut is to ask for a number four on the back and sides and a number six on the top, or whatever. This is all well and good if you know exactly what you want.
The object-oriented way, however, is to do what I do and simply to ask for a "trim" thus leaving the pedantic little details up to the barber. After all, it is he who encapsulates the knowledge of haircuts.
So, I walked into an object-oriented barber's and asked for a trim. When I came out, all my leading and trailing whitespace had gone.
What job hunt?
26th March 2005"So, how's the job hunt going?" asked Jon, some weeks after I'd made the decision to postpone all career-searching-related activities and concentrate on the more immediately important matter of coursework and exams until my degree is safely in the proverbial bag.
"Some weeks ago," I replied, "I made the decision to postpone all career-searching-related activities and concentrate on the more immediately important matter of..." Go on. You can guess the rest of the sentence. I'll give you a clue. It's in the previous paragraph.
"Don't," says Jon.
Of course. How dare I commit such a recklessly irresponsible act as finishing my degree before starting on job applications? As it happens, I had already thought about getting this sort of thing sorted out early, so I applied for one job way back in February, and received the corresponding rejection e-mail four days later. That's fair enough; their graduate places are oversubscribed by 150 to one. Since then, project work, various assignments and impending exams have loomed close on the calendar, so I made the aforementioned decision to forget any career-related issues until after June, when I can give them my undivided attention. After all, it's not much use being first in the queue for a graduate placement if you haven't actually got anything degree-shaped to wave at your employer come graduation.
Anyway, I'm recommended, what I should be doing at this stage, instead of such frivolous activities as project reports and assignments, is rattling off application forms at employers like they're being fired from a minigun. That means I'm to send many of them off at once. For those acquainted with Computer Science terms, this is the "parallel" (or, if you prefer, "pipelining") approach to graduate career tactics, as opposed to the "serial" method. For those not so acquainted, it's like firing applications indiscriminately from a minigun instead of taking careful aim with a rifle. My preferred option was the serial method. This way, you don't end up with silly race conditions like "I have been offered job A which must be accepted by the 10th of Octember, but there's a better job B that I'm being interviewed for on the 15th of Octember." Of course, if you go for the interview for job B, you might not be successful so you'd be back at square one. Also, you can't very well say, "Excuse me, company A, but could you possibly extend your deadline by about a week so I have the chance to accept a better job at company B?" This is clearly the way madness lies, so I was going to go for the easier and altogether more honest option of "pick the job I think I would enjoy most. Apply for that one. If successful, well done. If not, repeat from beginning with another job." The point of the serial method is that you should always wait for a definite result from one application before starting on the next one. This is a lot less error-prone, but takes longer.
Given all that, though, today I found it rather difficult to justify the serial method, on the grounds that for all the race conditions that can occur using the parallel method, they aren't really solved using the serial method. Rather, they're just avoided. I'm still not too clear on the issue (my mind will probably never accept one way or the other as the most optimal strategy until I produce a bloody great mathematical proof for it). Nevertheless, one thing that seems even clearer now is that this whole mad business should be left until after graduation, when I can give it some proper attention. Then I can muck about with miniguns and rifles.
Very simple things that people can't understand
17th December 2004
Mike left the milk out.
29th September 2004I know, it's not even worth mentioning, is it. Fair enough. End of blitherance.
Mike Mk. II
27th September 2004A bit of recap-history. As has been earlier recorded, Mike is in the slight predicament of being officially a paying housemate, but not a student. In February-March of last year, some weeks after Mike had committed himself to paying rent for this year (unless he quit and a replacement was found), it was suggested that if he were not to continue with his course, those doorbell-hacking physicists Oli and Morag could replace him and Jon rather than sign for another year in their house and look for two housemates there. Therefore, Mike insisted that he would stay on his course and that finding two housemates was not an option. He then cunningly waited until the day after said doorbell-hackers had signed next year's lease before reaching the decision that he could not, in all honesty, hand-on-heart, say that he was actually going to get anywhere with computer science, and could we get looking for two replacement housemates instead of one because he didn't intend to stay past June.
Mike's situation is therefore clearly, definitely and unequivocally His Problem.
For this reason, Mike has made his way to Leamington in his quest to find Mike Mark Two. He has shown unprecedented levels of organisation and motivation in this task, as he actually got round to making some phone calls and sending e-mails: one to the estate agent, one to the university's advice and welfare office, and one to the accommodation office to see if there was anything they could do to help. But he countered this sudden manifestation of energy and organisation; he thinks he addressed an e-mail incorrectly by mis-spelling "accommodation".
Mike (Mark One) has been charged by one of the various university offices with the task of putting up posters around campus advertising this spare room he doesn't want. Given that he doesn't have his computer with him, and he refuses to use pen and paper as a means of constructing a poster, he has attempted to enlist our help in designing, constructing, printing, and doing practically everything else except actually putting them up. He can't use IT services, he claims, because his account's been deleted. Not so, says `ypcat passwd | grep "M S Towers"`.
Now, although it has previously been established, with the help of capital letters, Whose Problem it is to find Mike Mk. II, I am going to help. A bit. Here's my effort.
CAN YOU REPLACE THIS MAN?
Is your bedroom carpet visible?
Is the majority of your house's crockery and cutlery in your kitchen rather than
sitting on your desk?
Can you do the washing without drowning garden animals?
If so, and if you just so happen to be a student stuck for accommodation wanting to move into a spare room in Leamington, we want to hear from you.
E-mail graeme at woaf dot net. But not if you're a spammer.
This isn't the best poster idea in the world, partly due the readership of my site being what it is (the typical number of visitors in a day can be counted on the fingers of one foot) and partly because the above is probably a sin against web design. But it's a fair effort for something that's SHIFTnot SHIFTmy SHIFTproblem.
Bottleneck
31st August 2004Tomorrow begins our third and final tenancy of our Leamington oblong. Accordingly, all the necessary arrangements will be made tomorrow. By which I mean, of course, I will make all the necessary arrangements tomorrow. The gas and electric need reconnecting; I can do that with a simple phone call. The ADSL, however, is slightly more difficult. I'm not talking about lead time (if you go with a non-BT provider, there is a customary period of about a week during which BT sit on their arses doing nothing before connecting a wire somewhere); that's not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is Bottleneck Jon1.
The BT line is still in Jon's name, and it ought to be in mine before I do any ADSL-related stuff. So, all Jon needs to do is telephone BT and have the account stopped, so I can ring up five minutes later and reverse the procedure with my name in place of Jon's. Now, I hold my hands up. I admit that my organisational skills in this case were inadequate. I, in a fit of absent-mindedness, thought for some reason that badgering Jon every other day for a week to make this one phone call was going to be enough to get him to do it. Now, getting Jon to do stuff has over the last few years been rather difficult. This will be the last time he'll act as a bottleneck to us, given that his student life is now over. However, like a computer game or a crossword, it's always the last level, or the last word, that's the hardest. Regard.
"Did you cancel your BT contract?"
"No, I forgot."
"Can you do it tomorrow then?"
"I'll do it in my lunch hour."
"OK."
sleep(86400);
"Did you cancel your BT contract?"
"No, I forgot."
"Didn't you get my text message at lunchtime reminding you?"
"My lunch hour was after then."
"When is your lunch, exactly?"
"It varies. Any time between noon and three."
sleep(86400);
Repeat.
Always being one to spot a pattern, I changed my approach. Jon needs reminding to do it, and he also needs to be reminded exactly on his lunch break, which varies from day to day. So, I warned him that today, Tuesday, after he has had three days of bank holiday weekend to prepare himself for the arduous task of making a phone call, I would phone him every fifteen minutes between twelve and three. You'd think that would be enough.
Today arrived. I rang Jon at noon. He mentioned that he was giving his mother a lift to North Leigh in ten minutes, and that he'd be back at 12:20.
12:20. I ring him again. The phone rings for a while, then three rising tones. Perhaps he's still on his way back from dropping his mother off.
12:22. Jon is reported to have been talking to Stik only five minutes ago. He hasn't even left yet, has he. Again, this is partly my fault. I've known Jon for several years, and I shouldn't have assumed that "I'm leaving for North Leigh in ten minutes" means anything other than "I'm going to start thinking about contemplating the idea of moving out of my chair in twenty".
12:35. Try again. Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring, three rising tones.
12:50. Try again. Ring-ring, ring-ring, three rising tones.
12:51. My phone rings. Jon says that he's run out of lunchtime. "Do it now then," I say. "Er, I don't have the BT paperwork handy."2
Game over. Better luck tomorrow.
1. Those who remember the series of Dilbert cartoons about "Bottleneck
Bill" will know where I'm coming from; "All purchase orders must now be approved
by me. However, I'll be too busy to approve anything."
2. Subtitle: "The number I have to ring, and our customer number and
phone number, are not currently being thrust before my eyes, emblazoned in 72
point on luminous paper, therefore it's too difficult to find."
Update
BT's line cancellation helpline does not, as Jon implied, open only during his business hours of ten until six. In fact, it is open from eight in the morning to eight in the evening. So, at one minute past six today, I rang Jon to tell him this joyful news.
Which would be joyful, had Jon not lost every last BT bill, each of which contains the important account number in the top corner. BT use this to authenticate people, presumably because people might forget passwords, but nobody would be stupid enough to lose their phone bills. However, as the saying goes, invent something that's foolproof and someone will invent a better fool.
Three down
5th July 2004The third year draws to a close. Actually, it did that last week, but I've only got round to writing about it now. Yes, I know I've had absolutely nothing to do all week, and indeed have nothing to do for the best part of three months. Look, I've had a lot on my mind! Well, actually, that's a lie too. There's been a distinct lack of anything interesting happening, so my excuse for this item being late by a week is... I'm lazy.
So, the year ended. I watched the Star Wars trilogy in a historic earlier-blitherance-redundancising achievement. I've almost finished Hunt the Wumpi (well, it's been "almost finished" for about a week now, I just haven't done the necessary work on it). In a double housemate exodus, the university has conferred a degree to, and pointed and laughed at, Jon and Mike respectively. Mike, then, shall move on to pastures new; unfortunately, all the fast food jokes that would go here have already been done to death. Jon has moved on to bigger and greater things; either that or he'll work full time for Woaf. (boom boom)1.
Mike, modestly declining to share his exam results with us, has left the house for the last time. His exit couldn't have been any more fitting - leaving his floor almost hoovered, bits of his belongings knocking around the house, and a freshly prepared Pot Noodle on the kitchen worktop. Still, credit where it's due, he did manage to find his front door key.
Jon got a 2.2, proving once and for all that you can leave all assignments to the last minute, spend more time in the pub than in lectures, and still come out with a respectable degree.
So with the exit of the two most-written-about-on-this-site housemates, come September, pub meets will go unorganised, crockery will go unhoarded, doors will remain intact, washing will remain free of flattened fauna, there'll be less useless computer equipment lying around, and nary a plate of spag bol will sit on the kitchen table for hours, "about to be eaten". With the culmination of the year comes the end of an era.
However, it does also produce the beginning of nearly three months of doing nothing important.
1. a cunning application of a polymorphic sound - that could either be the sound of a post-gag drum beat or that of my account getting blown up.
Housemates, coincidences
16th June 2004First blitherance in about half a year. Well, I've been a little busy with a presentation, a report, and exams. But enough of that, before this turns into a blog.
With Jon and Mike leaving, because, respectively, they've finished the degree and not been arsed to continue with it, the Housemate Problem has been lurking around for a while, i.e. there are two gaps to fill. Mike, at the time of signing next year's tenancy, still believed he could pass the year. So, he's half the solution; even if he might not actually be here next year, he's still contractually obliged to pay rent. The other half of the solution we're trying to solve this week.
So, Simon, a first year CBS student looking for somewhere to live come September, got shown round the house today. He mentioned that the kitchen isn't like the one in Benefactors. Coincidentally, this rather small hall of residence is the same one Jon and I inhabited in the first year.
"You're in Benefactors?" I said. "I was there in my first year."
"Really? Which room number?"
"218."
"OK... that's quite freaky, that's the one I'm in."
Expressions of surprise and exclamations of "it's a small world" and "did you get the heater-towel-rail thing to work" aside, I've looked at first year accommodation literature and calculated the probability of this little coincidence to be approximately 1 in 2000. That's 0.05%. That might not seem too impressive, but allow me to put this into perspective. That's less than the total percentage score Mike's going to get for his overall degree, which is 0.07%. That's how improbable it is.
Assignments
27th January 2004Ever heard of those four-letter personality types? There's a description of it here. Basically everyone is either an introvert or an extrovert (I or E), intuitive or sensing (N or S), thinking or feeling (T or F), and perceiving or judging (P or J). From this, we can pigeonhole everyone into one of 24 = 16 personality types. People I know who are more knowledgeable on the subject than I am have outlined me as an "INTJ" and Jon as "INTP" (which is an anagram of "PINT", naturally). Mike, apparently, is "INFP". No, these letters don't mean much to me either, and the next time I find a group of people talking about "the P mentality" or "must be an NJ thing" or "he's an N with S tendencies, which makes him incompatible with the ES mindset" I'm just going to shout "Mornington Crescent!" at them.
Anyway, the reason I waffled about these four-letter things is that there is one thing I've picked up about what the personality types mean. 'J' means you're organised and like to plan things, and don't like it when things don't go to plan, and 'P' means the opposite - that is, you're disorganised, prefer to "wing it" instead of making plans, and tend to muddle through whatever problem you're solving even when it doesn't go according to the plan you didn't make.
If you've been following the other blitherances, or the other pages dotted around this site, or if you have the misfortune to know any of us personally, you might have gathered that I fall into the 'J' mentality, whereas Jon, Andy and especially Mike are 'P's.
For instance, I'm the type of person who battles through hell and high water to get to every lecture throughout the term. I have a nice printed colour-coded timetable pinned to my notice board. I know what module code corresponds to which module. There's a piece of paper with all my deadlines on it, but I have them all memorised anyway. Today I handed in an assignment. I got a full night's sleep last night, having been working on the assignment for the last week and having finished it last night.
Jon and Andy [and Mike] are the 'P's. They'll battle through the same hell and high water to spend the entire morning [and afternoon, and evening] in bed instead of in lectures. Jon has a whiteboard with his timetable written on in marker pen, with all the lectures he finds too boring marked with a big X. Andy's lecture attendance so far this term has been almost equal to Jon's - that is, about 30%. Today they handed in assignments. They didn't get any sleep, as they only started it the day before the deadline. (Quoth Andy: "when's that digital assignment due, Graeme? Tuesday? Two days away? Bugger.") However, they're 'P's, and used to doing all-nighters. This means they would do a much better job in one night than I could do in the same time frame.
As for Mike, well, he doesn't even know what his library card number is, let alone what modules he's doing, let alone when he's got lectures, let alone what the assignment deadlines are, if any. And even if he did, he wouldn't do them. So, we can safely ignore Mike for about a sentence or two.
Aha! There's that word, assignment, that forms the title of this blitherance. I knew I'd stop digressing eventually. I dread to think how Jon and Andy would cope without me telling them when their assignments are due. Mike's different - while I don't know off by heart when Mike's assignments are (since he's two years below me) I read them off the DCS noticeboard and take the opportunity to bait him about them. The thing is, even when I do remind him about the assignments, it's like trying to knock down a wall with a table tennis bat, or telling Jon he's got an Efficient Parallel Algorithms lecture to go to. Typical conversation with Mike goes like this.
I walk into Mike's room.
"Been to any lectures today, Mike?"
"Hahahahaha! Don't be absurd."
"Thought not. Let's try a different tack. Been to any lectures since November of
last year, Mike?"
"Close the door on your way out."
"Did you hand in your COA assignment? The one that was due in today?"
"No."
(Incidentally, there's a reason why
this page from
December is titled "Mike Doing an Assignment". It's because that is such a rare
occurrence.)
"You know you have a maths assignment due for next week?"
"Do I?"
"Indeed you do."
"I'll bear that in mind."
Yes, of course he will. For all of two and a half seconds. Honestly, I go to all the trouble of reading the first year deadline noticeboard, and taking the mickey out of his inability to heed it....
I'm expecting that Mike will soon get an e-mail from his tutor asking him things like "why haven't you handed in anything?" and "are you still alive?" and "please come and see me about this, in room CS3.whatever..." to which Mike will respond asking for directions to campus.
Incidentally, towards the exam period, expect a blitherance entitled "You Won't Be Saying That In June". That utterance has become a catchphrase of mine, leaving my lips whenever Jon says something about what a pointless exercise lecture attendance is.
Mike's inability to answer the front door
16th January 2004House-hunting season has started, which means every two to three nanoseconds the doorbell goes, I answer it, get asked by the students who rang the bell if they can look around, and explain that actually, we're living in the house next year, however because we're all lazy computer scientists we haven't told the estate agent that yet. Well, actually the reason we haven't told the estate agent that yet is because we haven't got a housemate to replace Jon, who's leaving at the end of the year.
Notice it's always me, or sometimes Andy, who answers it. Jon's religion forbids him from getting up before noon or getting dressed before teatime. Mike's normal place of residence, his bedroom, has its door (or what's left of it after Jon repeatedly breaks it) less than four feet from the front door. You'd think Mike would be the one who normally answers the front door.
And there you think wrong. You assume that Mike is a normal, functional member of society. To the Mike FAQ with you, newbie! In actual fact, even when he isn't sleeping (times of which vary due to the Phase of the Mike), he just sits there at his desk ignoring the irritating electronic noises eminating from the bell. I have never, ever, seen Mike answer the front door. I've seen him waiting outside it many times after forgetting his key, but never actually answering it. Instead, I come down from one of the furthest points in the house from the front door, answer it, and curse at Mike through his door for a bit.
"Mike," I say, having held my one hundred and sixty-eighth seven-second
conversation with house-hunters that day, "why didn't you answer that?"
"It was blatantly no-one of interest."
"Yes, but somebody's got to get it, and since I can touch both the front door
and your bedroom door simultaneously without stretching, it doesn't take a
geographical genius to work out that you're the nearest to it."
Silence.
"So, Mike, what are you going to do next time the doorbell goes?"
"Don't answer it."
"Try again."
"Answer it?"
"Very good!"
I go back upstairs, and soon enough, the doorbell goes again. No Mike-getting-up noises could be heard from downstairs, which was why Satan's snowshoes have stayed in their cupboard for another year.
"Get that, Graeme," says Jon, employing the strategic "I'm conveniently still in my dressing gown at 4pm, which is why you have to get it for the fifth time in a row" trick.
Anyway, having typed this in the DCS lab, it's now noon, and I'm going home. That's the place where, in the time it takes me to go to campus, go to a lecture, mess about on my site, go back to Leamington, stop off at Asda, get some bread and cookies, and return there, nobody will have woken up.
UPDATE AT 13:10 - yep, thought so.
Star Wars
21st December 2003This blitherance was going to be about all the cock-ups we made in our latest cinema outing, in which we went to see Return of the King. However, we didn't make any. It was the most smoothly planned trip we've ever made. I even got into the retail park through the correct entrance this time, and not the service entrance I've been using for the past year under the assumption that it's the only entrance.1
So instead, I'm going to put in a rant about Star Wars. Now, this is not going to be a very educated rant, because I'm one of the four people in the world not to have seen any of the first three episodes. That's four, five and six, for those not acquainted with Base Lucas.
...
That pause was there to wait for you to regain your composure, perhaps re-read the last paragraph, and sit back on your chair. I'm pretty much used to it now. "Watch Star Wars" has long been on my list of "things to do when I get around to it" joining the ranks of such perpetually-procrastinationally-postponed tasks as "learn CSS" (partly crossed off) and "do my assignment". The thing is, "Watch Star Wars" isn't going to get done until some bright spark at one of the terrestrial television stations decides to actually broadcast the things. In my lifetime, I've noticed them come on twice. Maybe three times. Once when I was about ten (I remember Darth pulling his mask off) and once quite recently, within the last year or so. Each time I've seen snippets, but for some reason or another never got around to sitting down and watching it.
Star Wars related conversations of which I am a part usually go like this.
"You know when Luke and Han and the others are stuck on the ice planet of Hoth?"
"Uh? Are you feeling all right?"
"The Empire Strikes Back?"
"Oh, that. I've not seen it."
"Really?!"
"No. Not seen any of them."
""
What follows are accusations that I come from another planet (well, bad example, that happens anyway) and my defence "well, I have seen The Phantom Menace, does that count?" eliciting responses ranging from the negative to the hostile.
What happened the other day was that Jon mentioned a "Star Destroyer". I don't recall what the conversation was about, but he happened to mention it, and I asked what a Star Destroyer was. He replied that it was a wedge-shaped ship from Star Wars, at which point I gave a grunt of acknowledgement and continued with my beer.
Some banter similar to the above followed from another part of the table. "Ah!" I said. I pointed out that over the last twenty years, I've built up a working knowledge of what the whole story's about from the endless parodies, songs, general nattering about it, and so on. Well, at least I thought I had. When asked to explain what exactly I knew of the plot, I realised that all I knew were scattered facts here and there. I knew that Princess Leia's surname is "Organa", Yoda has little regard for grammar, Luke Skywalker loses a hand and gains Darth Vader as a father in what must have been a very annoying thirty seconds, R2-D2 is the short robot and C3-PO is the other one, the Death Star is spherical, Darth Vader has a permanent snore, and Chewbacca is a wookie (it was in a song I heard), for example. But aside from these trivial little facts I have stowed away in my mind somewhere, I have no knowledge of any actual plot, beyond there being a Dark Side and