but she's a girl...

A review of three things sharing a theme

2009-11-05T19:32:52Z

I'm lagging behind a bit on reviewing some stuff I've come across recently, so I thought I might save a bit of time by doing a three part mini-review. When I was thinking about it, I realised that the film, book and album I'm about to review share a theme: death.

I expect I've lost all three of my readers now. But in these difficult times, a bit of morbid fascination cheers everyone up, right?

Falling Angels by Tracy Chevalier

The novel opens with the death of Queen Victoria, and follows two families — the Coleman and Waterhouse families — who happen to have adjacent family plots in a London cemetery. Sweeping social changes are about to replace the formality of the Victorian era (with its obsession with elaborate mourning rituals and rigid social class system), with something more informal and fluid in Edward's reign. The women's suffrage movement is slowly gaining momentum, to widespread disapproval from those who are still hanging on to the old, Victorian ways.

Each chapter relates events from the viewpoint of one of the characters: Mr. and Mrs. Coleman and their daughter Maude, or Mr. and Mrs. Waterhouse and their daughter Lavinia. Occasionally, we get a very different view from the household servants, or from the boy who digs graves in the cemetery. The story (revolving around the cemetery) is pretty gripping, and the characters are brilliantly realised. In particular, the way that you see the two girls (Maude and Lavinia) maturing throughout the novel is fascinating.

Far North directed by Asif Kapadia

If you like the landscapes of the Arctic (it was filmed in Svalbard), you'll probably like this film. The photography is absolutely stunning, which is as well, because the plot is minimal and the dialogue almost non-existent. Given the minimal plot, it's difficult to describe without giving anything away, but I'll try not to post any spoilers. The story centres on Saiva (played by the terrific Michelle Yeoh) who has been told by a Shaman that she will bring death on disaster to any who get close to her. In an attempt to avoid this fate, she exiles herself, rescuing a baby called Anja along the way. One day they come upon a dying man, Loki, and everything starts to fall apart.

The film has a kind of harsh, mythic quality, enhanced by the fact that you can't place the time or geographical location of the action easily. I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I say that it doesn't have a happy ending, and death and relentless fate are omnipresent. At the time, it felt like quite a slight film, but it has lodged itself stubbornly in my mind, and I keep thinking about and reinterpreting events in the film.

Better Times Will Come by Diana Jones

I first heard a few tracks from this album in a concert of American Roots music shown on TV, and hosted by Seasick Steve. I found her mellow, unornamented voice and the way she sang about heartbreaking things with a total lack of sentimentality utterly mesmerising. And she tells a story so well. The songs on this album aren't (quite) all about death, but they are mostly sad songs about hard lives and difficult choices.

There are many good tracks, but in my opinion, 'Henry Russell's Last Words' is the best. Henry Russell was a Scottish miner who died in a mining accident in West Virginia in 1927. He and more than 100 others were trapped in the coal mine, and — without any hope of rescue — slowly suffocated and died. As the air was running out, Henry wrote a note to his wife Mary with a piece of coal. Jones used this letter as the basis for the lyrics.

The quiet acceptance, sorrow and dignity of Henry's words shines through the simple melody. Unless you are made of stone, the repeated refrain of "Oh how I love you, Mary" will bring tears to your eyes. Every single time you listen to it...

Suspended

2009-10-26T17:30:45Z

We were in Bristol this weekend, for a wedding (the one I had to go clothes shopping for). The wedding celebration itself was great fun, so we had a lovely time on Saturday evening. However, because of travelling problems, we arrived later than we'd expected, and had to leave at lunchtime on the Sunday. This was a shame, because I was looking forward to wandering around one of my favourite cities. As we arrived, I was trying to remember how all the streets interlinked, and found that I didn't instantly recognise parts of the area I spent a year living in. Then I worked out that it is over 20 years since I was an undergraduate in Bristol. Gulp.

I slept really badly on Saturday night for a number of reasons, waking at 4.30 am and lying awake listening to the hotel's extractor fans rumble. I was particularly annoyed because the clocks had gone back an hour that night, so not only had I missed out on sleep, I'd missed out on the 'bonus' hour you get at the end of British Summer Time.

A morning walk in the bright, cold air of Clifton on Sunday morning cheered me up, though. Old Brunel built some pretty spectacular constructions, but I have an abiding and deep love for the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I never get tired of the elegant shape, or the way it responds to and emphasises the natural beauty and drama of the Avon Gorge. I love every gigantic nut and bolt of it. I've put a small selection of the photos I took in a set on Flickr (the whole collection would bore even the most ardent Brunel fan). I'm only sorry that we didn't get to see how it looks at night, now that they've replaced the old lighting with a new LED system. It does sound as if it would nicely accentuate the features of the bridge, while giving the impression that it is floating above the Gorge. However, I'm nostalgic about the warm, slightly random fairy light effect that the old tungsten bulb system used to have.

Ninja shopper

2009-10-18T11:11:30Z

I'm off to a wedding next weekend, and I had nothing to wear. When I say 'nothing to wear' I don't mean in the sense that people often mean it ('I've got lots of suitable things, but I want something new', or 'I've worn that outfit more than once'), but literally, nothing suitable for a wedding. Unless you think that jeans, t-shirts, jumpers or one very light, very floral, summery dress are suitable for a winter wedding, I had nothing to wear.

So I was forced to try to buy some clothes. Regular readers will know how much I hate shopping for clothes (in fact, shopping for anything except computer gear, hifi equipment or records), so I had inevitably procrastinated until the last possible moment. Things were getting desperate. I decided that I'd do a bit of online reconnaissance first, so make the trip as brief and painless as possible. I looked through the websites of a couple of shops and identified some dresses that looked OK, then planned tactical visits to those shops: get in, locate dresses I'd found on the internet, try on, buy then get out like some kind of womenswear ninja.

Of course, things are never as simple in real life as they are on the internet. Once I was in the shop, there was so much stuff that I had real trouble finding and even recognising the things I'd picked out. Eventually — forcing myself to stick to the plan and not run home empty-handed — I found a few possibilities and trudged into the changing room with a heavy heart. One dress — despite allegedly being my size — wouldn't even go on without permanent damage to either the fabric or my body. Another fitted and was sort of OK but there were things I disliked profoundly about it, and the third made me look like I was wearing a knitted sack. I had to face the fact that I was going to have to go to another shop, and try on more things.

In the second shop, I found one of the dresses I'd seen on the 'net fairly quickly, which made me happy, but found that they only had a size smaller than the one I needed, which made me sad. Gritting my teeth, I decided that I should at least try it on, because the thought of having to go back to the first shop and buy the dress that was only sort of OK was too dreadful a prospect to entertain.

My first problem was how to actually get into the dress. With layers of lining and material, it appeared to be like an apple-pie bed, and I kept encountering dead ends, rather then finding my hand emerging through the neck hole. I got more and more frustrated, thinking, "This is ridiculous. I can write code fairly competently in a few languages, hook up computers and hifi gear without consulting manuals, and I even have a PhD for goodness sake: why can't I find my way into a dress and get my limbs in the correct apertures?"

Much tutting, mumbling and exasperated swearing later, I got the thing on, and after nearly dislocating a shoulder, fastened the zip at the back. Amazingly, despite apparently being a size too small, it fitted perfectly. And it actually looked quite good on me: as good as anything looks on me, since I'm more of a laundry basket than a clothes' horse. For the fashion fans among you¹ it's a kind of 50s shape of dress, with a boat neck, sleeveless, fitted over the torso and high-waisted, with an A-line skirt, in black². If you think of Audrey Hepburn, then substitute the adjective 'gamine' with 'Hobbit-y', you're along the right lines. Alternatively, take a JPEG image of Audrey (not in the 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' dress) and reduce only the vertical dimensions of the image, and that's the general impression.

I then had only to buy some shoes (another trial, but walking boots, trainers or Crocs don't cut it at a wedding), and I was free! With any luck, I won't need to go clothes shopping again for another 5 years or more.

¹ Though I have no idea why you're reading this blog, because there's precious little to interest you here. ↑

² Yes, apparently it is now acceptable to wear black to a wedding. I was amused to find, when searching on Google for an answer to this very question, that it's a very popular search phrase. White is still taboo (because you might be confused with the bride), but black is fine as long as you wear colourful accessories. And what else would you expect a ninja shopper to wear? ↑

A huge 8K of RAM

2009-10-10T17:06:05Z

I've been so busy at work the past few weeks that all I've been fit for at the end of a long day is flopping in front of the TV. One programme that I really enjoyed (for the nostalgia factor as much as anything else), was Micro Men, a drama about the rather strained relationship between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they competed to produce the most popular home computer in the 1980s.

Some of the detail was fictional (as they stated at the start of the programme), but they did apparently consult with both men, so I guess that the end result was something that they could both agree on as being mostly true. I had no idea that Sinclair had such a temper, but various interviews I've seen with people who knew him at the time suggest that he did blow his top fairly spectacularly on occasion.

We had a Sinclair Spectrum at home ("the full 8 colours!"), and I vividly remember pecking out long, tedious programmes gleaned from magazines and manuals on its rubbery, imprecise keyboard. I also remember the woefully unreliable method of loading stored programmes from a portable cassette recorder. If ever a piece of technology encouraged the superstitious belief that you needed to do a special dance or sacrifice a chicken before it worked, the Sinclair Spectrum was it. Despite all that, we loved it, and my brother and I spent hours fiddling about with it and (inevitably) playing games with rudimentary graphics.

I also used Chris Curry's products during my PhD (which immediately makes me feel ancient). I wrote a programme on a BBC Micro to control a bit of apparatus, and used a later Acorn RiskPC to run a more sophisticated set up, using a little-known programming language called Arachnid.

One thing I'd forgotten was how incredibly diverse the British home computer ecosystem was at that time. It was a kind of early technological Cambrian Explosion, with a massive radiation of weird and wonderful forms of computers before the inevitable mass extinctions occurred. As with the space rocket industry, there was a time when the UK (briefly) led the world in computer literacy and usage, before it all went pear-shaped. A glorious — if frustrating — time when 8 colours seemed impossibly dazzling, and 8K of RAM was more memory than anyone could need.

QuicKeys

2009-10-03T10:39:16Z

I've had a bit of an on-and-off relationship with QuicKeys, but it has certainly been a long one. When I have stopped using it for periods, it has usually been because I have adopted other ways for accomplishing the kinds of tasks it deals with, and it seemed like overkill to have a separate application running to deal with those things. However, with version 4, QuicKeys has become even more powerful, versatile and easy to use, and I am using it in earnest again.

For those of you who haven't encountered QuicKeys, it could be described as a macro utility for your whole system. You can create 'shortcuts' from a series of steps which automate actions that you would otherwise perform manually. There are a very wide range of possible actions in steps, from executing applescripts or shell scripts, to selecting from menus, manipulating windows, typing text or dozens of other things. You have quite a lot of control over the timing of these events and whether you need to wait for a particular window before moving on, which helps a lot in making the shortcuts reliable.

Once you have constructed your shortcut, you can trigger it in many different ways, from the obvious hotkey or mouse click to running if it is a certain date and/or time, if a certain volume has just mounted, or if an event occurs in another application. What makes this even more powerful is that all of the shortcuts can be limited to certain scopes (i.e. active applications). In practice, this means that you can reuse triggers in multiple applications without worrying that the wrong thing will happen. So you can — for example — launch a particular web page when you press F1 in Safari, and check for new email when you press F1 in Mail.

There are now also abbreviations (text replacements which happen automatically when you type a trigger) which replaces the need for TextExpander or similar utilities. In fact, the scopes make it very easy for me to type two dashes and a space and have them replaced with the HTML entity for an mdash in MarsEdit, and a unicode mdash in a rich text editor (which I've already done a couple of times in writing this article!).

(Read more...)

Parklife

2009-09-24T18:17:19Z

As I cycled home from work through the park, I witnessed this scene:

Two magpies stood watching a hedgehog. The hedgehog was walking — slowly and very precisely — along the white line of a football pitch. The mapgies kept about half a metre from the hedgehog, but walked along behind it, watching it intently.

I'm sure that they were probably sizing it up to see if they could eat it, but I couldn't help thinking that — apart from the fact that they weren't wearing tiny, twee clothes — it looked like an updated and slightly sinister scene from a Beatrix Potter book.

Academic Spring

2009-09-20T18:19:21Z

This coming week is Fresher's Week, so once again, the campus will be filling up with students. I always think that the start of the academic year is a kind of Academic Spring. Life seems to return to campus, with fresh-faced green shoots, eager to start their life at University, and there's lots of visible activity. Which isn't to say that nothing happens over the vacation: contrary to what undergraduates (and others) believe, academics don't get the summer vacation off. We usually work harder than ever to try to get some solid research done before we're swept away by the tide of teaching once the academic year starts. But that activity is rather hidden (like bulbs and roots developing under the soil) as we work hidden away in labs and offices.

It's the start of a very busy time for me. I've got more teaching to do than ever, but despite that, I'm looking forward to seeing those green shoots again, and diving back into public activity again. For me, Universities only really seem fully alive when they are populated by undergraduates.

That's my feeling now, anyway: ask me again in late November, and I'll probably be itching to get the mower out.

They call her the Ginger Ninja

2009-09-13T15:43:42Z

One of the great things about having two cats is watching them play together. Bella and Bianca remind me a bit of Clouseau and Cato sometimes (Bianca is Kato), particularly when they are launching ambushes upon one another from inside a duvet cover that's hanging over our bannisters.

"Not now, Cato, you feul!"

Infinite monkeys

2009-09-07T18:17:28Z

A couple of days ago, I went back to my office after leaving the computer for a short while, and heard the voice synthesiser reading out menus and other interface items. This — needless to say — was slightly freaky. The explanation was obvious, but still rather puzzling. You see, the cats have got into the bad habit of wandering over my keyboard recently. I've also found Bianca curled up peacefully on my MacBook's keyboard more than once. Considering that the laptop is on a raised shelf above the desk, you'd think this would be awkward, but apparently the toasty warmth of the processor and the shiatsu massage provided by the action of the keys is worth the trouble.

Evidently, in the course of either wandering across or lying on the keyboard, one of the cats had turned on a Mac OS X feature called VoiceOver: it is intended to assist people with visual disabilities by reading out the labels of whatever they are interacting with, text on screen and so on. The mystery part is that you turn it on with the Command-F5 keyboard combination: that's not easy to hit accidentally, even for a human with two hands. The F-keys are also quite small on both the external keyboard and the MacBook's own keyboard, so they aren't a big target.

My mind immediately conjured images of infinite numbers of monkeys sitting at typewriters. But forget the complete works of Shakespeare: if the cats ever randomly type 'FEED ME CAT FOOD NOW HUMAN', then trigger VoiceOver, I will be forever enslaved.

Alpine

2009-08-25T19:04:34Z

A few weeks ago, I got an EeePC 1000HE netbook for work. I needed a dedicated, cheap machine to run some Linux-only stuff on, and I thought it would be nice to have a lightweight portable to take on trips. I'll write more about the EeePC later, but I wanted to mention my new-found love affair with the console email client, Alpine. I installed the ArchLinux distribution with the Awesome window manager, both of which are very lightweight and speedy, and I wanted an email client to match.

Over the years, I must have used a pretty large number of email clients. From Eudora, Mailsmith, a brief and regrettable affair with Microsoft Entourage (about which we will never speak again) to settling for a number of years on Apple's Mail, it actually all started with Alpine's predecessor: Pine. Back in those far-off days, I used Pine by connecting to the University's VAX machine, and I hated it. To be fair, it has come a long way since then, and I have learned to love the command line. After a few days of playing with Alpine on the EeePC, I decided that I wanted to switch to it on my Macs too.

(Read more...)