a loose collection of personality defects' Journal

9:49am: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Atrocious. Utterly pointless. From what Kermode had said, I was expecting something that was basically OK but with some stretches that didn't quite work, whereas it's almost entirely awful but with a few split-seconds of nice imagery. I would have walked out and gone home, but the plan was to see Triangle immediately afterwards and I'd already got my ticket.

I'm glad I stuck around, because Triangle was terrific. I don't want to say too much about it, except that it's a psychological horror with a nightmarish recursive quality, and I only realised this morning, when surfacing from a interlocking series of Triangle-related dreams, that it was peculiarly appropriate to see it on the day on which the clocks went back.

8:44am: New toy revives old toy
About two years ago I got my first PVR after my Sky box died on me. It had its oddities but I was generally happy with it, but on Sunday it showed itself very reluctant to come out of standby, and when I did get it on I found that my library was completely empty - it had apparently wiped two years of recordings, including the first episode of True Blood, which I had really been looking forward to. On Sunday night it did successfully record Doc Martin and FlashForward and the recordings were still here on Monday morning, but after a failure like that, how could I trust it again?

So I spent most of Sunday evening researching online, and decided in the end to take a gamble on my Sky dish working with Freesat and to get a HUMAX Freesat HD Recorder - because I really was curious about HD, and also wanted to get some use out of the dish. I bought the box from Waitrose yesterday evening, discovering when I got home that I was right and the teenagers in the shop were wrong and the box does come with an HDMI cable, so I will be taking the extra cable back this evening.

I held my breath during the setup procedure as it was "checking for satellite feed" but a few seconds later the channel list was filling up. The picture quality is amazing, even for the regular channels, and the HD is fun, though not life-changing - it's not particularly noticeable for drama shows, from what I can see, but it does do impressive things with foliage in nature shows.

However... about halfway through recording FlashForward it stopped responding to the remote control (it wouldn't mute, for example). I put in new batteries and it made no difference, so once the program was over I boxed the thing up, ready to take it back to the shop the next day. I then reconnected my old PVR, discovered that my missing programs had come back (! and ?), but then started getting remote-control problems with that, too. Finally I figured out that the remote was in "TV mode" rather than "PVR mode" (i.e. talking to the TV, not to the PVR box), and once I switched it to PVR mode all was fine. The HUMAX manual said that the remote also had different modes, so I got it out of the box, made sure that it was in PVR mode, and again all was fine. Oops but also yay.

The HUMAX box has twin tuners, so you can record two programs at the same time, or record one and watch another. However, you can only do this if you have two feeds from the dish, and currently I only have one. Fitting multiple feeds is fairly simple in theory, but in practice my dish is several feet from the edge of my balcony, six floors up (I have no idea how the guy from Sky managed to install it without falling out of my bedroom window), and I'd rather pay someone £70 to take on those risks. I'll probably leave that for a few months.

7:40am: A sighting, and not an assault
As I was walking home last time, I spotted Noel Fielding (Vince from The Mighty Boosh) by the river outside the Design Museum. That is quite a nose.

The Spanish "asalto" most commonly means an assault, but I learned from the biography I'm currently reading that in Argentina it can also mean a pot-luck party. Maybe Argentinians have had fearsome experiences of pot-luck parties?

10:30am: Zaltzmans everywhere
Last night I went to see District 9 again, with a friend I hadn't seen in a few months since he'd been out of London for the summer. Afterwards we were swapping notes on the podcasts we've been listening to, and I enthused about Helen, Olly, and Martin the Sound Man of Answer Me This (which is hugely enjoyable once you've adjusted to the extent to which they laugh at their own jokes). My friend then told me about his favourite comedy podcast, The Bugle, with its UK correspondent Andy Zaltzman. And I did a double-take, since the aforementioned Helen is Helen Zaltzman, Andy's younger sister. What are the odds, eh?

1:35pm: The clearest gravy
The Swedish for sky is sky (pronounced "shoe"). This word also means gravy.

7:23pm: Broken Embraces
I'm not particularly an Almodóvar fan anyway, but I found this quite remarkably tedious. I should have gone with my impulses and walked out in the first twenty minutes. So pointless and so obvious that one might as well be watching one of Woody Allen's recent works.

On the other hand, The Hurt Locker was gripping, Inglourious Basterds was well worth seeing (despite the impression given by the trailer), Shorts was nearly as good as Spy Kids 2, and Sin Nombre was hellishly depressing but also a tempting introduction to the Mexican landscape. Yes, I've been busy catching up on films this week after my two weeks away.

5:50pm: Photos and itinerary for Scandinavian trip
I've have ventured onto google maps to do a drawing of my route, which I thought would be worthwhile since I'm assuming that most of the places I visited in Finland are relatively unknown. I also wanted to see the continuous, ground-level path stretching all the way into the Arctic Circle (north of Iceland, see!), which I find quite impressive. I calculated the distance earlier this week, and I covered over 6,000 kilometres.

I have now loaded and documented the whole set of photos (though mis-spelling most of the Scandinavian names by being lazy and not using the proper vowel forms - e.g. the capital A in Aland should have a little circle on top). My favourite places were probably Kokar (pronounced "shirkar") and Kemijarvi, which both offered a particularly concentrated form of restfulness.

11:28am: Back home
I got home yesterday after two weeks travelling by train, boat and bus around Finland, with some time in transit through Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. I think it will take several days before the my inner ear resets itself and the world stops swaying around me.

It was a very good holiday, and I saw many new places that I'm keen to see again and for longer. I hardly thought about work or anything back home at all, which was partly due to the fact that I was spending time in some very peaceful and relaxing places, and partly due to the fact that getting to those places involved lots of transport connections, most with little margin for error, so any free-floating anxiety I had was focused on that.

Photos soon, and exhaustive description later.

5:56pm: Almost too many ferrets
This time last year my productivity took some serious damage from a webcam of the nestbox of a blackfooted ferret and her baby. They were released into the wild after a few months and replaced with a female called Tilly.

I checked in on Tilly from time to time, and back in May the website said that she had been impregnated artificially and might give birth at the end of June, but she remained on her own (and that note silently disappeared), so I resigned myself to a ferretless summer.

However, about half an hour ago, while waiting for a test to run, I idly clicked on the bookmark, and found myself looking at a nestbox with four babies in it! And within seconds I'd discovered exactly why I'd spent so many hours last year staring at the tiny picture: because baby ferrets are possibly even more delightful than kittens (it probably helps if you can't smell them). In fact, there are more than four in there, possibly even seven; they tend to pile up and hide each other.

4:05pm: Scandinavian travel plans
I posted back in April about signing up for a week's Finnish course for August, which was to be the kernel for a rail trip in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia. Well, I heard a few weeks ago that the course had been cancelled because not enough people had registered. This had always been a possibility, and while I'd have preferred to head into deepest Finland with some improved Finnish, I couldn't bear to miss out on the aspects of the trip that I'd already pencilled in.

Before the course was cancelled, I'd been thinking of spending two nights in Bruges on my way to Finland, getting to Finland by overnight ferry from Stockholm. But being freed from the schedule of the course meant I could look into the idea of spending some time in the Åland archipelago between Sweden and Finland, and by the beginning of last week I had my accommodation there safely booked (three nights on three islands that get steadily smaller and further east). By the end of last week I had my InterRail pass and fourteen seat/berth reservations booked and paid for (from two different agencies, requiring some very long phone calls), and I now have both packs of travel-documents in my hot little hands. I never did InterRailing as a student (have hardly travelled in Europe at all) and I find this all very exciting!

I'm trying to learn some Swedish, just a few phrases and vocabulary, to show willing and to add extra interest to my time in Sweden and Åland. I did food on Tuesday and will try numbers tonight. Things are starting to sink in, though when I tried my "Good morning" on a Swedish colleague last week he thought I was speaking Spanish. I can only get better, after that.

9:42pm: The World Naked Bike Ride
I think it was last year that I first saw the World Naked Bike Ride. I know I'd just been to see a film near Picadilly Circus and I was walking down Picadilly to the tube station cursing the crowds - and suddenly Picadilly was full of naked people on bicycles, and me without my camera! I could have sworn I posted about it at the time, but I can't now find any trace of a post.

Yesterday I suddenly thought, "I wonder when the bike ride is this year." My timing was perfect since it turned out that it was today, due to start from Hyde Park at 3.30. I'd been planning to be in the area this afternoon anyway to see the French thriller "Pour Elle" ("Anything for Her") (very good), so I filled in the spare hour with lunch at my favourite Korean restaurant in Soho and with a bit of reading while perched on the window-ledge outside the closed Iran Air offices in Picadilly (I'm on a David Foster Wallace binge at the moment, which has taken me through and beyond Infinite Jest, whose 1000+ pages I finished at 10.32 pm last Sunday). I had my camera ready, with fresh batteries, and I took far too many picture of naked people rolling down Picadilly. The ride is just wonderful and I'm glad to have the pictures, though I think I might go camera-less next year and experience it as nature intended.

8:10am: A busy weekend
We on the Jubilee line are plagued with weekend closures for engineering work which make it hard work to go out and do anything, so I'm very pleased and surprised these days when I have a productive weekend.

I had a haircut early on Saturday morning, and afterwards I went to see the "madness" exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, which were as amazing as crazycrone had said, especially the Bobby Brown Diary Drawings. Then to the Haymarket to see Is Anybody There? which was good and surely has the best "badger doing an impression of Michael Caine" that we will ever see. Then home, to read and potter and discover that my scanner was no longer working, so I was reduced to photographing my favourite Sylvia cartoon in order to show the source of my giraffe in heels.

In the evening I met jinty and tortipede post-Che at the BFI and we had dinner at the nearby Pain Quotidien. I'd been past it several times but never eaten there before, and it was every bit as good as Jinty had said.

On Sunday I went to see the Star Trek film, which I enjoyed, but which actually did less than Galaxy Quest did to help me understand why I was so much in love with Trek for so many years (between about 1974 and 1984, I would say). Then to Waitrose with the intention of buying a £60 standalone scanner that I'd checked out on the John Lewis website, but they didn't have any standalone scanners so I came home with an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier for £100, and to my surprise it did indeed talk to both the Mac and PC and turns out to be properly, independently wireless, so I don't even have to plug it in to my wireless hub. And the print quality is staggering. I remember the first printer I ever bought - in 1990? - cost £430 and was a basic black-and-white inkjet, and I was thrilled with it. I would not want to be in the hardware business, having a mere 20 years to figure out how to deliver a thousand times the functionality at a quarter of the cost.

10:20pm: A good work day after a few rough patches
There was the tense hour of a closeout meeting for the project that took up most of March and for which I was test manager. The project mostly went well (it's a nice team) but the project manager is notorious for leaving things until the last minute and as a team we let him get away with it again. And again we spend the last week stressed out and working long hours, and he shrugs it off as if there's no other way he could possibly have prioritised his time. We had all vented to each other in private over this, but in the closeout meeting I was the only one who seemed to feel the need to name names - though I did try to be tactful (by my standards) and to make all of my comments constructive. At the end he did apologise to the team and the mood was good, and I think we do have a good chance of handling things better next time.

I spent April doing testing on a project that was supposed to be released at the end of June. I was assigned to spend 40 hours establishing the stability of the software, which made me the first person to do any systematic testing on the thing. That was enough time for me to show the team that the software was as stable as a giraffe in six inch stilettos, so the release date has been postponed to September or later, giving priority to my current project, which I joined properly about a week ago. The development work on this project started many months ago (I was involved in a design meeting for it about a year ago), but again there had been no systematic testing. The project is being run using a new approach in which the development is organised in four-week "sprints" - with reviews and the chance to revise priorities and change focus between each sprint. I'm working on devising a new approach to the testing in which the test team designs and performs the tests for the new developments for a particular sprint during the four-week cycle for that sprint - which makes the process much more immediate and pacy, and involves working much more closely with the developers.

The first thing I did was come up with a method of presenting test designs in the form of a flowchart, to allow them to be reviewed easily. The detailed test scripts are typically in the form of a series of steps in a spreadsheet and they're very difficult to skim-read; you generally have to sit down and work through the script with the software in order to see what the test is doing, and I've always dreaded having to review other people's designs. After half a day's experimenting I worked out a method for drawing the flowcharts in a separate sheet of the test-script file, using pre-defined shapes and the spreadsheet structure to minimise the amount of faffing that the test-designer has to do to keep things aligned and in proportion. During this week I've drawn up test designs for two pieces of development and sent them to the developers for review - and they've both come back with lots of critical (but constructive) comments, with a particularly severe setback just before I went into the tense closeout meeting. But it only took me an hour or so after the meeting to digest the comments, revise the design, and send the new version off for the next review, so it wasn't a bad way to end the work week.

And the fact that I'm getting such useful comments does seem to show that the flowcharts are a good way of depicting the designs, and also - as I have long suspected - that discussing plans for testing is a very efficient way of revealing and correcting misunderstandings about the requirements for a particular development (and it never fails to astound me how many ways there are of misunderstanding software requirements). Having a tool for discussing test designs is good for communication with developers, and also between testers; I've designed about 95% of our current tests, and while I enjoy designing tests, I will have to spread the load if we're to get this software up to standard by the end of September, which means trying to figure out how to train test designers. I have a tickling feeling of panic - there is so much work to be done - but I think this new approach to testing is going to make the process much more fun (and effective), and is going to be the start of the formation of a proper test team. Which possibly means that I'm working on making myself redundant, but we will see.

9:03am: Photographs from London Open House 2008
I flew to New York on holiday the day after Open House weekend last September, and while I did post briefly about it once I got back home, I didn't follow through on the threat to give details.

Until now, since I have finally got around to uploading my photographs. I spent Saturday mostly along the river between Greenwich and Woolwich, and since it was a lovely day I got some pictures near the Thames Barrier that I'm very pleased with.

I tried cross-posting this yesterday from DW but it didn't work. I'll try again in a few days.

11:02am: Mood: accomplished
Thanks to wesleysgirl, I am now on Dreamwidth.

Norwegian friends from work came over for dinner on Wednesday, and on Tuesday evening I was getting the flat presentable when I discovered that my vacuum cleaner was no longer working. I had suction, but specks on the carpet were insisting on staying put. It turns out that suction isn't enough, and your beater bar (a rod with bristles on the underside of the machine) needs to be turning around at speed to whisk the specks off the carpet and into the zone of suction. With the help of the instruction manual and a screwdriver I discovered that one of the drive belts for the beater bar had snapped, and after about 20 minutes ferreting around the Panasonic website I discovered that they were still doing the full set of replacement parts for my machine. The parts arrived on Thursday and I installed the new belt last night (a fiddly task), and managed not to break or disconnect anything else in the process.

Wednesday's dinner was a success. I'd wondered about keeping my guests occupied while I was cooking, and had decided to would ask them to make a Mii avatar of each other, so that I would get to see them as I was doing my morning jog around Wiffity Island. They had fun with that and then insisted on doing a Mii of a Greek colleague who had been driving us bonkers on our last project about a month ago. All three Miis are instantly recognisable, and I wave to them as I pass them on the track.

12:52pm: I dreamed last night that I had taken up smoking. I don't think I have ever before imagined myself as a smoker and have no idea why I should do so now. Maybe it's the start of hayfever season and my respiratory tract wanting attention.

9:04am: Happy birthday, shewhomust!
I hope you have a great day (with better weather than we've got down here).

9:36pm: Summer holiday coming in to focus
I've just written a cheque for a deposit for a week's Finnish language course near Turku in the south-east of Finland, for the first week in August. I first heard about the course last June but couldn't do it last year before of jury service. I got an email a few weeks ago which mentioned it was running again this year, and today I decided that I would definitely do it. With any luck, I'll get to spend some time with tittakv too.

After I'd made the decision I wandered over to The Man in Seat 61, which is an amazing resource on flightless travel. I don't mind flying but I really like trains, and I've seen almost nothing of Europe. There are ways of getting to Finland by train and ferry but they're kind of complicated and expensive, and after an hour of dithering I decided it just wouldn't work. And then an hour later I somehow got the idea of avoiding the 12 hour ferry from Stockholm to Turku (or vice versa) by taking the train north to where Finland joins Sweden, and then getting the train down through Sweden. Which would take 3-4 days, with stops for sightseeing. And with this it makes sense to get an InterRail pass and things get simpler (for certain definitions of "simpler"). So the plan is to get the ferry from Stockholm to Turku on the way out, spend the weekend in Helsinki with tittakv, and then take the long way round on the way back (when my Finnish should be better). I could even head over to Norway on the way back.

Next purchase: the Thomas Cook Railway Timetable.

9:47am: My waterproof jacket is missing
I opened the cupboard this rainy morning and it wasn't there. I think I last wore it on Saturday and suspect I left it in the cinema when I went to see Race to Witch Mountain (quite entertaining and confirmed me as a Dwayne Johnson fan). I will call the cinema later and see if they have it.

I kind of hope they don't since it's not as waterproof as all that. Good enough for a half hour walk to work, but not for being seriously stuck out in the rain. I'd like to give another brand a try, and Rohan have some good prices at the moment.

2:06pm: On not being sure what 2666 is about
I said a couple of weeks ago that I thought it would take me two months to read 2666 but in fact I finished it on Friday. I made such quick progress because there was nothing else I wanted to do with my free time, and I can't remember feeling such regret over a book as the remaining pages dwindled. It's over 1100 pages long, and yet I wanted it to be longer. Part of that might be that I was hoping to be given the key (or set of keys) that would make the meaning of the book clear, and it felt as if that explanation would need at least another 300 pages. And yet the ending is completely satisfying, and though the book is full of digressions, they never for a second feel self-indulgent.

So... what might it be about? ( Read more... )

I'd said back in January that I suspected I'd never find out the significance of 2666 and I can tell you now that "2666" does not appear anywhere in the novel. That reference to the cemetery in Amuleto is probably the best we're going to get, and that seems entirely appropriate.

It took me several months to get my hands on a copy of the novel, since the Spanish edition has apparently been selling like crazy in London ever since the English translation came out. The first Spanish copy I ever saw was chained to a bunk bed in Tate Modern, as part of TH.2058 in the Turbine Hall. The bunk bed was one of many in a refugee centre in a post-apocalyptic or dystopian future, and each bed had a novel chained to it. There were hundreds of copies of Ballard's The Drowned World and of Dick's The Man in the High Castle, and 2666 was the only novel that only appeared once. I suspect it's also the only novel there that can be read as an entirely realist novel, with a realist approach to its mysticism. The artist must really have wanted it to be there, and, OK, it is the book I'd most want to be stuck with in a refugee centre.

I was discussing the Tate exhibition with Carlos when I was a mere 50 pages in. It turned out that he'd visited some time before I did, and at that time the books were not chained, and there were many more copies of 2666. Our two visits and the differences between them could have come straight out of the novel itself.

2:10pm: arcadas...
... is the Spanish for arches and arcades, and also for retching. They are a strange people.

Ginebra is the Spanish for both gin and Geneva. I wondered for a while if gin was named after Geneva, but in fact it's named after the French for juniper. Geneva isn't named after the French (or the anything) for juniper, and the Spanish for juniper is enebro.

I have learned these things from Roberto Bolaño's 2666, which is a book which is FULLY AWESOME! It is also fully long, at nearly 1200 pages in Spanish (900 pages in English translation). I am now on page 150 and expect it to take me at least two months to read, but so far it is a very enjoyable process.

4:28pm: Warmth
I think I've mentioned in passing that my central heating has been turned off for a while. A valve in a cupboard off my hallway developed a leak back in December - a leak bad enough that I was having to empty the bucket every six hours, which meant I couldn't go out for a full day's work. The council is responsible for the heating in the block and after about five calls to their repair line I finally got a visit on the 8th of December from two guys who said they couldn't fix it then and there but would have to order a new part, and in the meantime they would have to turn off my central heating in order to stop the leak. They took my numbers and said they'd call me when the part was in - sounding as if it would just be a couple of days - and that was the last I heard of them. And the valve was still leaking - though at a fraction of the previous rate so the bucket could safely be forgotten for days at a time.

Since then I must have made at least 15 calls to the council's repair line and was told six or seven times that the contractors would call me back within 48 hours to report the status. They never did.

Earlier this week I got my latest electricity bill and discovered that it was three times the normal amount thanks to three months' use of a fan heater. First thing yesterday morning I called the repair line again, and this time I insisted that a call to the contractor to find out the status would not be good enough, and that I wanted a visit from the contractor to be booked for the next day.

The guy turned up promptly around 10.30, and after assessing the situation said he didn't have any afternoon calls booked, so after he had done the rest of his morning calls he would go to the depot and see if they had the necessary part in stock, and if they did, then he'd call again in the afternoon to make the replacement. He came back around 3 and when he left at 4 my radiators were all radiating away and the bucket was unemployed. I'm happy and relieved but also... exasperated (with myself as much as with the council and the contractors) that I've spent so much time and electricity on something that turned out to be fixable in a matter of hours.

9:54am: Sprites
A while ago some friends lent me the Icelandic film Cold Fever, and I finally got around to watching it a couple of weeks ago. It's about a Japanese man who visits Iceland in the depths of winter and it is deeply peculiar. At one point he is rescued from car trouble by what appears to be an iceberg sprite in the shape of a young girl, and this reminded me of my favourite bit in the wonderful Alexei Sayle's Great Bus Journeys of the World. It's from a section on bus legends of the world:

NORWAY

The Hammerfest Tree Sprites

The people of Hammerfest in Northern Norway believe that bus conductors are Tree Sprites. The conductors encourage them in this belief. It means that, in general, passengers are more likely to embark and disembark in an orderly fashion and less likely to spit for fear of the terrible mischief that the Tree Sprites will visit upon them. The conductors are also from time to time given small votive offerings of seed cake and aquavit which, as they put it, don't come at all amiss on a cold Hammerfest morning.

We also have The Bleeding Bus of Lima, which features the Convent of the Little Sisters of Psychiatrically Dubious Self Denigration, and ends:

And thus it is that every year on the anniversary of her martyrdom, the 27b bleeds.
Some people think it might be brake fluid.

The book was co-written with David Stafford, who also co-wrote Train to Hell with Sayle and How to be a Genius with the cartoonist duo Biff. All very funny books, but if he's done any humour-writing on his own, I've never been able to find it. Someone did once mention to me that he'd done a column called "Staffordshire Bull" (or similar) and that it was excellent, but it has eluded me so far.

[The icon is an Expired Foodstuffs Sprite. I think I found it via Disturbing Auctions.]

4:36pm: I'm baking banana bread
Using a Riverford recipe, and bananas from my last Riverford box. It's my first attempt at banana bread and I have no idea what it will taste, look or feel like, but it's making the flat smell so good.

[This icon is my "happy domesticity" icon. The cat is French, apparently.]

5:23pm: The LRB personals return to form
They have been dull recently, which I'm inclined to attribute to the publication of the book, which I assume brought the section to the attention of people who mistakenly thought it was for trying to attract a mate, rather than for making people laugh. However, judging by the issue I've just read these people have now drifted away, and in a compact two columns we have:

Dear LRB, I have no money. Please run my advert for free. I want a woman who is 38. Let her know I'm really clever and good-looking. Thanks.

Everyone. My life is a mind-numbing cesspit of despair and self-loathing. Just fuck off. Or else write back and we'll make love. Gentleman, 37.

I make my own sexual lubricant. The secret ingredient is Bovril. Man, 56. Congleton.

I put the phrase 'five-header bisexual orgy' in this ad to increase my Google hits. Really I'm looking for someone who likes hearty soups and jigsaws of kittens. Woman, 62. Bury.

All of these ads and the events they describe bear a striking resemblance to me and my life. Select the bits you like, then reply to M (or F) at box no. x.

For this issue, the bottle of whisky is apparently being awarded to "the sender of the most normal advert". The winner was not one of those above.