Dan Q

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Games I Have Been Playing Recently

There’s a couple of computer games I’ve played recently that I thought I’d share with you so that you, too, can go play them and waste all your free time (hopefully you’ve got more free time than I do to be wasted!).

RUCKINGENUR II

Free (as in beer) to download and play – download it here. Windows only (requires the .NET framework), although there’s talk of a Linux port using Mono.

A self-confessed “game for engineers.” If you ever played Uplink and thought “Hmm, this is good, but I’d rather be hacking hardware, not software,” then you really ought to give it a try. Ruckingenur II is a hardware hacking simulator: in it’s four missions you’ll be determining the code of an electronic door lock, reprogramming a thumbprint scanner to accept your print, breaking the code of a (rather trivial) radio scrambling system, and defusing a tamper-proof bomb. It’s all about interpreting the circuitry and analysing signals, rather than simply bridging circuits, as would be so much easier in so many of the missions. Presumably your boss spent all of the money on the universal combined multi-meter/serial port analyser/debugger and didn’t have any budget left to get you a soldering iron and a half-dozen lengths of wire. Ah well.

It’s only short. I got through all four missions in about 20 minutes, and I could probably have done it quicker if I hadn’t kept detonating the bomb at the end: the very first thing I did was to examine the circuit (while the clock is ticking), correctly analyse which wire carried the signal to the expolosive, and send a quick pulse down that line, confirming my suspicions by blowing my face off.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on, fellow geeks.

SPORE

The other game that’s consumed any of my time of late – by which I mean, of course, all of the free time I can find – is Maxis’s hot new title Spore.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, Spore is the result of a collaboration between Will Wright (co-founder of Maxis, inventor of SimCity, The Sims, etc.) and Soren Johnson (right-hand man to Sid Meier during the development of Civilization III and Civilization IV), it’s has been described as “the ultimate God game,” and as “SimEverything.”

During the game, you’ll help a species progress from being a tiny plankton-like creature living in a drop of water all the way up to being a galactic empire spanning many star systems. The concept of “evolution” touted in the game isn’t really accurate, though, and what you’re actually doing – tweaking your species a little each generation towards your own goals, rather than having the most successful genetic code reflected in the next generation – is closer to intelligent design than anything that any evolutionist would approve of.

Unfortunately, as its Zero Puncuation review gives away, most of the fun of the game is shunted towards the Space Phase, the last of the five phases of the game (the others being Cell, Creature, Tribal, and Civilization), and it makes the rest of the game seem a little short by comparison (note that I disagree with the statement in the Zero Puncuation review about carnivore-superiority: my first space-faring race had no problem with befriending and converting other creatures, tribes and civilizations all the way). The Space stage, however, really shines.

Spore is an amazing achievement, and it’s continues to be fresh and surprising to play (thanks, in part, to the enormous scope of it’s in-game galaxy, but more thanks to the fact that Spore “swaps” your creatures and other content with other players around the world), so I’d recommend you give it a go if you haven’t already. It’s a real shame that the DRM is so fucked-up, because Maxis have just set themselves up for Spore to be the most-pirated game in history (after all, the pirated copy is now better than the legitimate one). Nonetheless, it’s worth getting hold of a copy by one means or another just so you can see what the fuss is all about.

Oh, and here’s one of my species, a Gliblander, stood next to the species’ interstellar spacecraft, the Dirty Beast.

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Pictures From PolyDay 2008

For the benefit of people I promised pictures to, here’s some of the photos I took at PolyDay 2008, the post-Dossie Poly Meal, and generally during Claire and I’s trip to London this weekend. There are more photos I’ll share in due course, little doubt, and my write-up of what PolyDay was like, which I may post if and when I get the time, too. But for now, photos – make up your own damn story.

Click for bigger pics.

Thanks to everybody who made it a fabulous weekend.

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SSL Client Certificate Authentication In Ruby On Rails

I’ve been playing with using client-side SSL certificates (installed into your web browser) as a means to authenticate against a Ruby on Rails-powered application. This subject is geeky and of limited interest even to the people who read this blog (with the possible exception of Ruth, who may find herself doing exactly this as part of her Masters dissertation), so rather than write about it all here, I’ve written a howto/article: SSL Client Certificate Authentication In Ruby On Rails. If you’re at all interested in the topic, you’re welcome to have a read and give me any feedback.

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Ruth’s Blog Post

That one over there.

It fills me with warm fuzziness. After a weekend away doing all the things she mentioned (as well as a number of unmentionable things in The British Museum), I’ve got a pile of e-mail and blog entries to get through this lunchtime, so I shan’t waste time blogging myself. Instead, I’ll just point you at Ruth‘s blog entry and leave it at that. Oh; wait – I already did.

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Pictures From The Weekend

I couldn’t (easily) post these pictures while out-and-about, so I thought I’d share them now:

The tailbackon the M6. That’s a serious amount of traffic at a complete standstill, and people million about on the carriageway. In the distance, in the first one, you can just about make out the tops of the emergency services vehicles, despite the low resolution of the picture.

Gareth and Penny’s birthday cakes. Gareth’s is decorated with a small place flying across a blue sky, while Penny’s is shaped like a fairytale castle.

This was the moment during their recollection of their boating holiday that Matt suddenly realised that what Liz was telling him about a “steaking incident” was actually true and not something he’d dreamt.

Claire, Jimmy, and Beth. I don’t think Beth approves of this photo being taken.

A fabulous example of BiCon’s non-assuming, gender-doesn’t-really-matter thinking, in the form of the signs on the toilet doors. Behind these, the secondary signs are the same, except the the “Toilets with urinals” sign has had appended to it “Standing up okay,” and the “Toilets without urinals” sign has had appended to it “Standing up okay, put you might end up pissing on the seat.”

Not only a transgender-friendly statement, these signs also function as a reminder that in an environment where your gender is one preferred by not 50% but closer to 95% of the people present, imposing privacy by something as arbitary as gender is even more pointless than it is in the rest of the world.

The organisers of BiCon run a census each year. I think this photograph of a small part of the survey really does reflect “BiCon thinking” when it comes to the definition of gender and sexuality. One question reads “What term(s) do you use to describe your gender?”, with the following options – female only, female mostly, female somewhat more, female/male equally, male somewhat more, male mostly, male only, none/no gender, androgynous, genderqueer, other (please specify). Where almost any other survey would provide in the region of two mutually-exclusive choices, BiCon’s survey provides 10, which can be used in combination, and the space to define an answer yourself if you’re not satisfied with those available.

BiCon attendees are encouraged to decorate their name badge with stickers showing their affiliation to various groups, causes, ideologies, relationship structures, fetishes, etc. These make really good conversation-starters, but the list on the first day – with about six different “codes” – tends to have no bearing on the final-day list, fully-expanded by people adding their own codes and encouraging one another to make use of them. Click on the list to zoom in.

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Back From BiCon

Just got back the The Cottage after the drive home from BiCon. Where’d we get to at the end of the previous post…? Ah, yes…

Naked Lunch Saturday was amazingly oversubscribed. One attendee, a regular to Naked Lunches for the last 10 years or so, described his experience of coming into the room and, at the sight of so many people, briefly thought he’d come into the wrong room up until he noticed that everybody was naked. I skipped the next workshop slot for a nookie-and-nap break, because both Claire and I were beginning to suffer from the heat and exhaustion, as well as being in anticipation of having to be more wakeful for the journey up to Manchester and the party that’d be waiting for us there.

The run up to Manchester could have gone better. Sure, the M6 Toll was zippy as always, but two minor fuck-ups slowed us down. Firstly, I made a miserable failure of navigating our way to Beth‘s house (the map didn’t show all the no-right-turns on Leicester’s ring road). Secondly, we got caught only about 35 metres behind a five-car pile-up on the M6. All the lanes were completely closed and people were outside their vehicles, milling about on the motorway. Eventually the emergency services, having rocketed along the hard shoulder past us, were able to clear a lane for us, and we were able to carry on. I’ve got a fab picture of the tailback with people standing around on the carriageway.

We finally reached the airfield where Penny and Gareth‘s party was being held. I’m not sure, but somehow a flying school with a fully-stocked bar seems like a bad idea to me. In any case, we drank a lot and ate barbecued food and did a “pub quiz” and ate fabulous cake.

It was really nice to be able to catch up with folks like Liz, Bryn, Matt R, Matt P, Jimmy (although he’s coming back to Aber soon!), Beth, and – of course – Gareth and Penny. I don’t see enough of these guys these days. It was really great to catch up and share drinks and stories with them.

Being at BiCon had rubbed off on me, of course, and a side-effect of this was that I kept looking for the name badges (and accompanying “sticker code”) of strangers at the party, which of course they didn’t have.

We made great time on the motorway back down to BiCon, rocketing our way back down the M6 and reaching Leicester at almost 2am. We dropped off Beth at her house (far easier to find with her in the car giving directions, although still not as simple as you’d expect given that she’s lived in the town since she was 2 years old), because we couldn’t manage to persuade her to accompany us back to BiCon, pay for a day pass, and see if we couldn’t all find a party to go to – she said she had some kind of family thing to do in the morning.

The BiCon Ball had finished well before we arrived back on campus, but people were still doing their thing: lounging out on the grass singing, sitting around in or outdoors chatting, and wallowing in a paddling pool full of tiny toy lions (the “lion pit”), among other things, with copious quantities of food and alcohol strewen around and being shared freely with just about everybody. Fair play to the staff at the conference centre, who had no problem whatsoever with the fact that their venue was chock-a-block with people at various levels of sobriety hanging around not just around the campus but also in the bar and accompanying buildings, which by rights they probably could have locked up hours earlier.

Eventually, Claire and I found ourselves – at 5am – among a pile of people in a the “lion pit”, drinking mead and beer and an awful bottle of wine that somebody donated to us simply to get it off their hands. I’m a little fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure that we had some kind of “lion pit rule” about pillow-beatings (and occasional whippings) for participants who made particularly bad puns, performed experiments in trying to get a circle or people each using the one to their left (or their right) as a pillow, and exposed breasts. By the time we went to bed, the sky was beginning to get light – apparently some of the folks we left behind were still chatting and throwing toy lions at one another right up until the sunrise.

Sunday morning brought me into workshops in Housing Law (this was actually a really fascinating lecture on the legal aspects of different kinds of tenancy and non-tenancy agreements such as being a lodger, the definition of homelessness and being threatened with homelessness, and an easy-to-understand summary of the rights and responsibilities of tenants and of landlords), and in Conflict Management. This second workshop was a follow-up to the previous one, and actually gave us as a group an opportunity to try out a variety of different techniques for resolving jealousy, domestic disagreements, and more. I took a lot away from the session, both imminently useful (for example, a better understanding of my own feelings about some of the inevitable complications that have come out of Claire and I’s unusual [well, unusual in general – at BiCon we were among a large minority] relationship structure) and a selection of great ways to ensure that I’m expressing those feelings and getting the best compromise possible in general. I remember, shortly afterward, talking to another participant who’d said how much he wished that more monogamous couples had the kinds of negotiation skills that poly-people end up having to learn, and I agreed (and, to be fair, this has been my thinking exactly when I’ve lent my copy of The Ethical Slut to monogamous friends).

There was time for one more Naked Lunch between trips to pack all of our stuff back into the car, and the Twister board came out again, so I got to play a game of Naked Twister in the end (and I’d have won, too, if it weren’t for a particular young lady who tripped me, the dirty cheater!). In hindsight, playing Naked Twister then stopping for a ice cream and a chat about software engineering with a pair of geeks, completely nude, could be remembered as at least a little unusual, but at the time nothing felt less weird. By the time a group of disrobed people have gotten beyond their “hey, we’re naked!” moment, they mostly act just like clothed people. But with marginally more perving.

The closing plenary was it’s usual collection of thank you and goodbye messages, as well as an offer by the organisers to the guests to loot any food, beer, and training materials that remained at the centre. After this came the traditional ritual of dozens or personal goodbyes, hugs, and exchanges of e-mail addresses, social networking usernames and weblog URLs, and phone numbers. Yet again, I’ve met a ludicrous number of fascinating people, and I’m hoping to catch up with some of them at events like PolyDay, if I can make it to it.

So, just like last year, BiCon rocked. Huge thanks to everybody who made it great for me, whether that was by running one of the fabulous workshops, drinking with and chatting to me at the bar or at any other gathering, showing me what a dirty slut you were at the purity party (have I got plans for next year – oh yes!), bringing and playing board games, stripping off, or just being there and being fabulous. See you next year!

Edit: Corrected spelling of “pasty” to “party”. Most of this entry was written using my phone, while in a moving car, and so my use of predictive text was less-than perfect. Let me know if you find any more typos like that!

Edit: Fixed more spellings; thanks Sarah!

BiCon Fun And Games

It’s been hard to find time to post a blog entry here, with everything that’s been going on. Here’s the quick rundown so far:

Thursday. Arrived. Checked in. Accommodation is a lot like Penbryn, for those who know what I mean, although with bigger (but more sterile-feeling) bedrooms. Caught up with loads of folks from last year. Drinks at the bar. Board game (Apples To Apples) with friends. Fab.

Friday. Quick trip to Sainsbury’s (we were looking for Asda but got lost) for food supplies. Bacon sandwiches for breakfast. Opening plenary. Bigging Up The B In LGBT (which turned out to be about how trade unions can better represent their bisexual members). Being Bisexual In The Workplace. Then clothes off for the Naked Lunch. Chilled out for a bit. Solving Conflict In Poly Families (met some people with fascinating poly-backrounds). Dinner of pasta. Self-Harm: How We Cope With Stress (some fascinating perspectives expressed there). Missed out on Naked Twister. Drinks on the grass. Ran a Purity Test Party. Fell into bed at about 2am, but some folks were partying all night (none of this “bed at dawn” nonsense: ACTUALLY partying all night).

Saturday morning. Flapjack for breakfast. Juggling workshop (fun ball-tossing fun and perving at hot poi-people). Non-Traditional Families (lots of interesting child-raising ideas). And now I’m making a packed lunch to take to today’s Naked Lunch, then time for a few more workshops before driving up North to Penny and Gareth’s party, picking up passengers on the way.

All in all, having a fab time. Wish you all were here.

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Year One – A Happy Post That Everybody Will Misunderstand To Be An Unhappy One

Ruth and I celebrated the first anniversary of our being a couple, this weekend. She came down to Aber and we took the steam train up to Devil’s Bridge, wandered around the waterfalls, and spent a good few hours sitting in a pub (pretty much the pub in Devil’s Bridge, tiny place that it is) playing darts.

I’ve never really been one for celebrating anniversaries. A birthday is an ocassion to go out for a pint, and new year is when you… well, that’s when you go out for a pint, too. But it was really quite good to spend some time with Ruth (something I’ve not had a lot of while she’s been living in Oxford, this summer) doing the coupley things we don’t often get to do.

Fuck knows where we’re going to be in another year’s time. If her plans play out the way she’d like, she’ll be leaving Aberystwyth again this time next year, and I’m still going to be here. Neither of us are particularly confident about the prospect of pulling off a long-distance relationship that will work in the same kinds of ways that the relationship we have now does, and I’ve suffered a smidgen of anticipatory grief about the possibility us coming to an end.

On the other hand, we’re both keen to see what we can do to make sure it doesn’t have to end unless it absolutely has to, and that’s reassuring. And I am, as always, optimistic. We’ve got today. We’ve always got today.

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ZibraZibra

If you haven’t already, take a listen to ZibraZibra – they’ve got the silly little player on their MySpace page, so you can tune in there. They describe themselves as “Space age. Sonic Synthesis + Guitar Shredding + Scandinavian and American Mentalities + Soaring Vocals + Hott Beats + Jumpsuits + Circuit Bending + Classical Cello + Whimsical Lyricism + Bodybuilding = ZIBRAZIBRA.” I think that’s a little wordy, so I’ll suffice to say that you really ought to go to that MySpace page, if only to listen to Arcade Catastrophe and Tick Tock.

Right – I’ve got a weekend of code ahead of me. Off we go…

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Swimming To Work

I turned up to work this morning, bright and early, and the first thing I noticed was that my desk, the four computers and the UPS block under it, the KVM switch and Ethernet switch on top of it, one of the two monitors on top of it, and both keyboards on it were all full of water. There was also a sizeable lake of water all over the carpet around my desk, which made disconcerting “splashy” sounds as I walked over it, and my chair was similarly drenched.

“Shit,” I swore out loud. I looked above the desk and noticed that the skylight directly above it had been left open. “Oh, fuck,” I swore again. I’d been sure that I’d closed it before I left the office on Friday: and I was certainly the last person out…

The good news is that it wasn’t my fault, in the end. My co-worker, Gareth (this Gareth), had come in at the weekend “on his way back from the shops,” to use the internet connection (he hasn’t got one at his new home, yet), and while here opened the window to let in some fresh air.

The other good news is that the damage was limited to totalling a couple of mice and keyboards and costing us the time to mop up the remaining water this morning. Gareth had a go at using a vacuum cleaner to remove the worst of the dampness from the carpet, but failed when we later realised that the machine was simply ingesting the water and then squirting it out through the vents at the back. I suggested a nappy was in order, and we briefly considered putting the vacuum cleaner outside the window and continuing to work at sucking up the moisture, but we eventually thought better of it: now we’ve just got the office fans blowing across the damp patch in the hope that we can expedite evaporation.

Just another day at SmartData.

Update: here’s some pictures of Gareth trying to clean and dry the carpet… using a vacuum cleaner?

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What Not To Do When You Lose Your Mobile

Maybe this is just a pet hate that is exclusively mine, but there’s something that really gets on my nerves and it’s happened under one of the two scenarios below at least three times within the last month. It’s as if the very second you let people loose on social-networking site Facebook they immediately lose all common sense.

Here’s the scenario: you lose or break your mobile phone – I’m sure it’s happened to us all at some point or another – and as if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re stupid enough to not keep a backup of your contacts (virtually every phone can do this now, so there’s no excuse for the vast majority of people). Well, fair enough: like I said, this could happen to anybody, although you’re already due a talking-to by me about keeping your information backed up, and if it’s been stolen I’d quite like to know what information you had about me on there at the time. But in the most part you have my sympathy… so far.

How’re you going to get all those carefully-collected numbers back in your phone? Well, here are two wrong ways to do it. I’ll explain why later:

  1. Send a bulk Facebook message out to everybody you know.
  2. Create a Facebook group.

So why are they wrong?

Bulk Facebook Messages

The first and biggest reason that either of these methods are wrong is pretty fundamental, though: you’ve lost my mobile number, that’s your problem, so why don’t you make some of the effort to fix it. My mobile number is on my Facebook profile. I put it there so that you wouldn’t ever have to e-mail me if you wanted it. It’s there because improving connectivity between and sharing personal information with friends is entirely what Facebook is for. So next time you misplace your address book – which you failed to back up – why don’t you do some of the leg work and actually go to my profile and look it up for yourself.

If you can’t see it on my profile, it’s invariably because I’ve used Facebook’s (now-quite complex and powerfu) privacy tools to hide it from you because I don’t want you to have my mobile number. So there you are. If you’re on my Facebook friends list you should never, ever need to send me a Facebook message to get my mobile number.

Secondly, sending a bulk-Facebook message is wrong because it almost always leads to retards “following suit” like this:

I don’t mind getting James’ new mobile number over a Facebook message. That’s fine. I shan’t be responding, because he ought to be bright enough to get my mobile number for himself, considering it’s only one-click away. But by bulk-sending it to everybody he knows, he’s underestimated the stupidity of his other friends. About 50% of the people he sent it to sent their mobile numbers back to the list by using “Reply All.”

Reply All is the only option available, and so a new Facebook user could conceivably make this mistake. But then a handful of James’ other friends make the same mistake, having seen one of them do it already. Wait, did I miss something? Are these people all patients at some mental hospital that James used to volunteer at, or something?

I don’t know who any of these people are, aside from the fact that they’re James’ other friends. I’m only permitted to read the profile of one of them, and he isn’t sharing his mobile number with me there, so I can only assume that they don’t want me to have their number. But then they’ve just turned around on that idea and given it to me. What?

I’m half-tempted to set up a handful of fake Facebook accounts just so that I can send a message back to each of the idiots like this:

I Need All Your Mobile Numbers

Between You, An Identity Thief, A Stalker, Somebody You’ve Never Met, Their Ex-, Every Man, and His Dog.

I’ve lost my mobile (again!) and can’t be bothered to look up your numbers on your profiles or contact you individually. Please use the “Reply All” form below and tell me and all the other people in the list above exactly how to contact you and harass you whenever we get bored.

Facebook Groups

The other, even more irritating way that people handle this self-inflicted (let’s face it, paper and pen is a backup if there’s no other way) tragedy is by creating a Facebook group exclusively for the purpose of re-harvesting their friend’s numbers. I’m sure you’ve all seen this happen at least once.

And it happens a lot: log in to Facebook and search for “lost mobile” in the Groups list. You won’t ever find out how many idiots do this, because Facebook only lists the first few hundred results. But there are lots. Lots and lots.

The first thing that’s wrong with this approach is an issue which I’m sure I’ll be one of very few people to care about, but it’s not the biggest problem: Facebook “Groups” are, by definition, according to Facebook’s own documentation, collections of “people with similar interests” and “places for discussion.”

I’ve never joined one of these “I’ve lost my mobile!” groups, because:

  • I’ve never lost my mobile.
  • Even if I had, I wouldn’t realy say I have an interest in lost mobiles. I have no intention to discuss what having lost a mobile is like, or even what my friend having lost their mobile is like. And I’m pretty sure that isn’t what they want, either.

Not only is creating a Facebook group a mis-use of the service – this isn’t what groups are for! – but they suffer from all the same problems as Facebook bulk-mailing all your friends (i.e. if they reply, they all see each others’ numbers) but even worse. Most people create these groups but don’t make them “secret,” so anybody can join. Want a few hundred numbers to sell to an SMS-spammer? Just browse Facebook for awhile. Worse still, these groups don’t disappear until (after) every single member has left. So your phone number, which you stupidly put in the group description (if you’re the idiot who lost your phone) or on the wall of the group (if you’re one of their even-bigger-idiot friends), will be visible to pretty much any Facebook user, indefinately. Give yourself a pat on the back. I suggest using an ice pick.

What Little Timmy Should Have Done

Never let it be said that I’m overly negative when I criticise morons. I’m more than happy to educate them and I won’t even demand the right to use a heavy, blunt object to help the knowledge sink in.

Here’s what you should be doing in order to show off your uncommon sense. You can start today!

Back Up Your Mobile Phone

Just stop and think for a moment what your mobile phone is worth. I don’t mean the cost the insurance company will pay when you drop it in a pint of cider a week on Friday, I mean the value of the data inside it. How long would it take you to put all those numbers back in? If you’re a heavier user of the geekier features of modern phones: what about all the photos, e-mails, text messages, music, and the carefully-tweaked settings that make the icons have a purple background and that Crazy Frog video ringtone?

  • Most modern mobiles can be connected to a PC by a cable (which sometimes comes free with the phone) or by Bluetooth, and free software (often from the phone manufacturer’s website) will let you make a backup copy of everything on your device. It’ll take seconds, and doing it as infrequently as four or five times a year will save you a universe of hassle. Just look for a feature that will enable you to read all the data from the screen of your PC if you need to – for example, if your replacement phone isn’t compatible with the data from your broken old handset.
  • Pretty much every mid- or high- end Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson handset and some LG and Siemens handsets support a technology called SyncML (there are links to lists of compatible phones at the bottom of that page). Using this technology and a free on-line provider like many of these ones, you can back up your entire address book to a safe online repository over the Internet. Sure, if you’re on Pay-As-You-Go you’ll pay a few pence to do an Internet upload, but isn’t it worth it even if you just consider that the price of insuring your data?
  • Even if you’re using an ancient handset, consider keeping a paper backup (little black books are very affordable) or a typed-up list in a spreadsheet (Google Docs provides a free online spreadsheet). Or, if virtually all of your friends are on Facebook or another social networking site that allows the exchange of contact details, encourage them to keep their mobile numbers on their profile; suitably locked down to “friends only” (or even just to specific friends), of course.

What To Do When It All Goes Wrong

Everything goes tits-up from time to time. Suppose you lost your phone in a house fire that destroyed the PC the backups were on, too. Or maybe your phone got stolen and the new “owner” was so malicious he used your SyncML connection (if you’d saved your password on the phone) to overwrite all of your online backups with pictures of Lolcats. Or perhaps you didn’t keep backups at all (so long as you promise to keep backups next time, it’s not so bad – we all have to learn the hard way once, I’m sure, how important backups are). What should you do?

First: take responsibility. There is always something you could have done to keep a better backup. Therefore, it’s your job to do as much of the legwork of getting your numbers back as you can. Don’t make it your friends’ problem. Go through your friends’ Facebook profiles and retreieve as many phone numbers as you can before you start bothering them.

Second: get numbers in a sensible way. If you have a few close circles of friends, it’s pretty trivial nowadays to Bluetooth/MMS/Infared hundreds of contacts from phone-to-phone, and this can be a great way to get yourself re-connected. Call up Barney, and say “Hey, Barney; let me buy you a pint tonight and take a copy of everybody in your address book – I’ve been an idiot and I didn’t keep a backup before I lost my phone the other week.” Barney’ll drink his pint and press some buttons on his phone while saying things like, “Do you know Robin? Marshall? Lily? Have you met Ted?” and these people will magically appear in your address book.

There’s almost certainly be people you can’t re-get the numbers for in this way, but you can still be sensible about it. Send messages individually to those few people and ask for their numbers, but not before double-checking that you actually need them. If you can’t think of a reason you’ll ever call them within the next year, why are you carrying around their number anyway? Unless they’re somebody you’d call “in an emergency” you can always look them up when you need them. That way, you won’t spend you entire time with a number in your phone that could go out of date (people change numbers all the time) and you’d never know until you came to phone them, six years down the line, and you’d have to look them up anyway. Save yourself (and them) the bother and keep them out of your book. It’s a liberating experience to tidy up your contacts list.

And finally: if you get a new mobile number with your new phone, drop a text message to everybody who might want to know it, but make sure you say who you are because you won’t be in their address book with your new number, yet. The number of text messages I’ve got in my life from a number unknown to me that read “Hey there! This is my new number! Bye!” is staggering.

Some people are just too stupid to be allowed mobile phones.

Demolition Of Y Tabernacle

Following the fire at Y Tabernacle, Mill Street, Aberystwyth at the weekend, the decision was made that it was structurally unsound and had to be demolished. It’s sad to see such a beautiful (pics) old building torn down, but one can’t help but marvel at the speed and efficiency with which they did it. This morning, as I walked to work, there was no sign of any of the heavy plant machinery that later appeared. Yet this evening, as I look out of the windows of my office, the building’s suspiciously absent – from this distance, it’s just a space in the skyline.

I’ve taken a few videos of the demolition on my mobile and uploaded them to YouTube. If you can’t see them below, you might try here.

I notice that the fire’s being treated as suspicious, and I hear that arrests have been made. I’ve also heard my fair share of conspiracy stories already about it – the building is apparently a recent aqcuisition of Merlin Homes, whose boss (rumour has it) was conveniently out of the country when this and (allegedly) another Merlin Homes building burnt down in a very short space of time… I suppose they’ll be building a block of flats on the site, now.

But hey; people will gossip.

The Evolution Of Socks

There’s an evolutionary process occuring in my wardrobe.

I have an approximately equal number of dark-coloured and light-coloured socks, but since we moved to The Cottage in the summer of 2006, I’ve been keeping my socks not in drawers but in a compartment in my unlit wardrobe. As a result, I can only really see the light-coloured ones when getting dressed on a morning (and turning on the light would wake The Morning Beast). I seem to get through clothes generally, and socks in particular, at quite a rate, and as a result I wear holes in and have to dispose of light-coloured socks far more frequently than dark-coloured ones.

But when I buy new socks, they often come in mixed packs of light and dark colours. So the dark ones become more numerous, while the light population fluctuates. Okay, so it’s not really like evolution, because the creation of new socks is not based on parentage, but there’s a real survival-of-the-fittest thing going on there, with those that are less-able to be seen in the dark outliving their more-visible brethren, like those studies on peppered moths.

Getting dressed this morning, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Lovelock‘s Daisyworld:

In the early 1980s, James Lovelock built a computer simulation known as Daisyworld which was designed to demonstrate the feasability of his Gaia hypothesis, a controversial theory that suggests that planetary life, through it’s interaction with it’s environment, unconciously attempts to create an environmental equilibrium that is particularly suitable for the continuation of life. The theory has been more recently undermined by hippy-types taking it on board as if it were some kind of neo-Pagan religion (contributed to, perhaps, by the unfortunate choice of name).

In any case; I mention Daisyworld because of the great recreation of the simulation that I am most familiar with – the one that came packaged with SimEarth in 1990. Daisyworld is an Earth-like planet orbiting a star which is slowly expanding into a red giant. The dominant life form on Daisyworld is a variety of flower which comes in a variety of lighter and darker shades (like socks – see; I can make a point eventually). Early on in the star’s development, when the planet is cool, dark-coloured daisies are most common, and lighter-coloured ones are rarer. As the star expands and throws more radiation at the planet, being able to reflect light becomes a desirable trait, and the genes for lighter-coloured petals lead to a greater survival rate, shaping the evolution of the daisies. Early in the simulation, almost all daisies are dark, and towards the end – right before the star engulfs the planet and kills all of the daisies, anyway – virtually all of the daisies are light.

Lovelock expands on this to demonstrate that the colour change also helps to keep the overall planetary atmospheric temperature down as evidence for his “living earth” theories, but that’s not the bit that interests me. I’m pretty sure that my socks aren’t trying – even accidentally – to maintain “wardrobe homeostasis.”

In any case, I was probably a little too young when I first played SimEarth to really appreciate the simplistic beauty of the models it demonstrated. I understood evolution and why it worked, sure, but it still only took so long before I decided to see what would happen if I introduced dinosaurs to Daisyworld or something. As it happens, they over-populate, eat all the daisies, and then die out from lack of food. Stupid dinosaurs. But they did do a good job of demonstrating how a particularly successful species can really fuck over the biodiversity of a planet: they always seemed to prefer to eat the lighter-coloured ones.

Maybe that’s where all my socks keep disappearing to.

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