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Geocaching Like Batman

As the days get longer and the weather gets better, woodland trails and city alleyways alike begin to more-frequently see a particular brand of explorer. Clutching GPS devices (or, increasingly, mid- to high-end mobile phones), these satellite-guided adventurers shy away from normal people, whom they call “muggles”. Outwardly, this is out of concern for the continuity of their tiny treasure, but as often as not, it’s because geocachers – and especially urban geocachers, who often don’t even have the excuse of “getting some fresh air” to justify their hobby – are likely to be seen as a little odd., “You do what for a hobby? Find lost lunchboxes?”

I’ve written plenty about geocaching already, but the only important thing to know for this particular anecdote is how geocaches are rated to indicate how hard they are. There are two scales, each scored from one to five “stars”. The first scale is difficulty, which is about how challenging the geocache is to find – a 1-star rating means that it’s in plain sight, not camouflaged, etc., while higher ratings might mean that it’s well-concealed, tiny, disguised as something else, or requires that you solve a puzzle in order to determine where it is. The second scale is terrain, which is about how challenging the geocache is to get to. A 1-star rating is typically accessible by wheelchair – you certainly don’t need to leave paved roads and footpaths to get it; higher ratings might mean steep gradients, tree climbing, long hikes, and so on. The highest terrain ratings often mean that specialised skills or equipment are required (for example, rock climbing gear or a scuba tank).

As you can imagine, caches with a 5-star “terrain” rating are rarer, and are especially uncommon in built-up areas. Half-way up cliffs… deep inside caves… miles out to sea: these are the places you’d expect to see geocaches with the highest level of “terrain” score. So imagine my surprise when I discover GC13WZQ (“Swing Lower”), a geocache with a 1-star “difficulty” rating but a 5-star “terrain” rating, just a few minutes walk from Oxford City Centre. In the seven years this cache has been in place, it had seen fewer than 110 successful visitors: contrast to its neighbour, GCK57Z (“Swing Low”) – a virtual cache less than 10 metres away – which has seen about six times as many visits in only 3 years longer. This, I thought, was a cache I had to see.

The sides of the bridge, boarded up and with barbed wire. Photo by OxfordLad on Geocaching.com. — OxfordLad (who took this photo), and other geocachers claimed that, since early 2014, the cache was made entirely inaccessible by the boarding-up of the sides of the bridge.

Folks recently attempting to find the geocache had reported (OxfordLad, izybuzyfingers, twitcher50) that it had been made inaccessible by the recent addition of boards and barbed wire to the edges of the bridge. Counter-arguments were raised (sandvika, Mad H@ter) to show that this didn’t make the cache inaccessible; it merely made it accessible only by boat, which had already been suggested in the “attributes” for the cache.

Geocache with "boat" attribute — Only an idiot would attempt a ‘requires boat’ geocache without a boat. Right?

I’m not a believer in the idea that any particular geocache can only be found one particular way. Also: I don’t have a boat. So I decided to make an expedition to “Swing Lower” my own damn way. Approaching the bridge under which the cache is located, I immediately saw the boards and barbed wire that had been reported by those that had attempted it earlier in the year. But as I would soon discover, anybody who was put off by a little bit of plywood and the risk of damp feet really wasn’t built of the right stuff to be able to do what was required next. Put simply: boards and barbed wire are the least of your problems when you’re hunting for GC13WZQ.

The bigger challenge was getting to the cache once underneath the bridge. I discovered (perhaps with a little inspiration from “Jackhuber”) that it was possible to brace myself against a pair of the beams that run the length of the bridge and – facing down – shuffle sideways to get to the centre of the bridge. I felt acutely aware of the fact that until I got over the central channel, the depth of the water might not be enough to break my fall (especially if I slipped and fell head-first), but was reassured by the fact that I’d brought fellow ‘cacher and coworker kateevery and she was ready, perhaps not to swim out and get me but at least to call 999, should the need arise.

Dan holding the geocache he's found above his head, triumphantly. — This is how Freddie Mercury holds a geocache.

So there you go. To all of you wusses for whom “there are boards and barbed wire in the way” was an excuse: you hadn’t even begun to face the challenge of “Swing Lower”. I’ve written up a Batman-themed description of the expedition as part of my log report.

A screenshot of the clue for GC54F78, one of the caches in my new series. — Can you make out the coordinates in this image? No? Maybe it’d help if you looked at geo.danq.me.

This conveniently coincides with the week that I launched my new collection of puzzle geocaches, the Oxford Steganography Series – four geocaches (GC54F78, GC54F7B, GC54F7J, GC54F7N) whose coordinates are concealed within images or text, each of which contains a transparency film that can be used (I made a video showing how) to determine the coordinates of a fifth, bonus cache. I’m reasonably pleased with the series, and I’ve been enjoying reading the reports of the ‘cachers who’ve been out hunting for them, so far.

Social Engineering of the Day

This afternoon I was sent out to a distant corner of Oxford University, to which I’d never been before, in order to deliver a lecture on information and computer security. I just wanted to share the exchange that happened when I arrived, because it’s so delightfully ironic:

Dan walks into the building and, seeing the security gates, walks up to the reception desk. Papers left loose on the reception desk indicate that a lecture on security is happening today.

Dan: [pointing at his name on the papers] That’s me. I’m here to deliver the presentation on security. Where should I go?

Receptionist: I’ll buzz you through the gate – go down the stairs, and to the end of the corridor. There’ll be swipe-locked doors you can’t get through, but just hang around for a minute or so and you’ll be able to follow somebody else through.

That’s right – I turned up at a building in order to teach the people there about security, and – without identifying myself any more than pointing at a piece of paper and saying “that’s me” – was given a temporary ID card and encouraged to piggyback my way through their checkpoints. I guess they needed me more than they thought!

Ice and Lemon

I recently finished reading a novel called Ice & Lemon, which was given to me by my mother for Christmas (my reading list is quite long at the moment; I’m only just getting close to catching up!). I could tell you about what I liked about the book – and I will, in a moment – but before that I’d like to mention what makes this book personally so spooky to me, as a reader.

My mother got it for me because the coincidences apparent on the front and back cover appealed to her:

The author’s name, Pete Hartley, is remarkably similar to my father’s name, Peter Huntley.
The strapline contains a date, and that date is my mother’s birthday.
The protagonist of the story is called Daniel, which is – prior to that point in the late 1990s when I started going by Dan among virtually everybody – my name.
The front cover shows a picture of a baby’s hand, and Ruth‘s expected delivery date of New Year’s Eve was thus a hot discussion topic for us all around Christmas-time.

Okay, so – that’s a handful of quirky coincidences, certainly, but I’m sure if you looked at every volume in a bookshop – in the right frame of mind – you’d find a dozen other novels that seemed similarly fortuitous. But as I began to read the story, I discovered that I shared a lot more in common with the story’s Daniel than I could have possibly predicted. It was almost as if I were reading an alternate-history version of my own life – it’s incredibly easy to see how believable choices made in the early 2000s could have lead to a reality that even-more closely paralleled with my own:

Dan with a golden banana nailed to a stick. — In 2006, I won an award of dubious value for my stand-up act: a gold-plated banana nailed to a plank of wood hewn from the funniest tree in town.

Daniel’s partner is called Claire. In 2005, when the story is set, I too had a partner called Claire.
Daniel grew up in, and lives in, Preston, near to the football stadium and his local supermarket, the Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way Sainsburys. I grew up in Preston, and my parents houses are both within sight of the football stadium. My father used to, and my mother still does, do their shopping at the Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way Sainsburys.
The story begins with Daniel travelling back from a trip to Spain. I too spent time in Spain in 2005.
Daniel is a stand-up comedian and a veteran of the Edinburgh Fringe. I had an incredibly-short career as a stand-up comedian, and of course I too have a history with the Fringe.
Some time after an apocalyptic event takes place, Daniel joins a group of survivors who call themselves “Camp Q” (no explanation is given for the choice of name). Some time after the date of the event as it appears in the story, I changed my surname to Q.

The Sainsburys on Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way, in Preston. — Before the apocalypse, Daniel did his shopping here. Before I moved to Aberystwyth, so did I.

There are about a hundred smaller coincidences in Daniel’s story, too, but after a few of them you stop looking objectively and you can’t help but see them, so I’ll spare you the list. If I wanted to, I’m sure I could find plenty of things that definitely didn’t fit me: for example, Daniel’s significantly older than me. That sort of blows the alternate history idea out of the water. But nonetheless, it was a disturbing and eerie experience to be reading about a protagonist so much like myself, travelling around a post-disaster area that I personally know so very well. I feel like I ought to reach out to the author and check that he’s not just pranking me, somehow. His son features in the book, but somehow the coincidences that naturally occur as a result of this are less-impressive because they’re pre-informed.

The book itself is pretty good: a soft science fiction story full of a thorougly-explored post-apocalyptic grief. Very human, and very British, it exemplifies that curious sense of humour that we as a nation exhibit in the face of a disaster, while still being emotionally-scarring in the sheer scope of the tragedy it depicts. The science of the science-fiction is… questionable, but it’s not explored in detail (and it’s only treated as being speculative by the characters discussing it anyway, who aren’t scientists): this is a story about people, suffering, and survival, not about technology nor futurism. There are a handful of points at which it feels like it could have done with an additional pass by a proofreader; while occasionally distracting, these typos are not problematic. Plus: the book contains the most literal deus ex machina I’ve ever encountered (and thankfully, it doesn’t come across as lazy writing so much as general wasteland craziness).

It’sunder £3 in ebook format, and if I didn’t already own a paperback copy, I’d be happy to pay that for it. Even if it didn’t make me feel like I was looking at an alternate version of myself.

Horoscopes

A little over a third of my life ago, when things were very different, I was dating a girl who had an unusual approach to horoscopes. During the period that we lived together, each morning, I’d see her perform a peculiar dance (at the time, I thought that it was things like this that defined her particular insanity: later, I learned better).

She’d get up and check her horoscope on Teletext (again: if you needed any clue as to how long ago we’re talking, there it is): that was usually her first port of call for her astrological guidance. She’d sit there, waiting for Scorpio to load (at the end of the second page of Teletext horoscopes)… and then decide whether she liked it or not. And if she didn’t like it: if that particular horoscope didn’t suit her – she’d reject it. She’d go and check her horoscope in the newspaper, and see if that one was better. And failing that, she’d go onto the Internet and find a horoscope online; and so on, until she found one that she wanted. (I wonder what she’d have done if she’d have found a fortune cookie that she didn’t approve of? Eat another?)

At the time, I mocked her for it. But over time, I’ve come to see that “choosing your own horoscope” is no less-insane, and perhaps a little saner, than believing in the power of horoscopes to begin with. To argue against her behaviour on the grounds that she’s choosing a horoscope rather than using the ‘correct’ one, one must first accept the legitimacy of the process of assigning people personality characteristics based on the relative positions of the Earth, Sun and distant stars at the time of their birth. You can argue against her on the grounds that she’s crazy, of course, but I think we can agree that somebody who reads several horoscopes and chooses one isn’t any more crazy than somebody who reads just one horoscope and then accepts that as legitimate.

@SelinaWilken: Sometimes I'll read horoscopes, and just go down the list until I find the one I like best. This month I'm Aquarius. — Your horoscope for this week: you will choose a different zodiac sign and use that, instead.

The craziest thing about my ex-, in this particular quirk, though, was that she tried to justify her logic when I challenged it. My friend Selina once tweeted that she would select her favourite horoscope from the list of 12 zodiac signs available to her from a single source. I think that’s marginally more-sane again, than my ex-: while my ex- used to read the same star sign from several different media (demonstrating that she harbours a belief in astrology to begin with, but that she finds things made by humans to be flawed), Selina’s actions show that she’s able to take the whole thing with sufficient sarcasm that it almost doesn’t matter.

A yet still saner option might be to write one’s own horoscope, rather than funneling yourself into “one of twelve”. It’s still a little bit silly, but at least you’re taking responsibility for your own destiny. Furthermore, writing your own horoscope might be considered akin to an affirmation, which can act as an effective method of self-help. For example, if my ex- were to write her own horoscope, every day, which read “Scorpio: you will no longer read horoscopes nor believe in the power of astrology”, then eventually she might come to fulfil her own prophecy.

Japanese blood type personality chart — A not-uncommon Japanese superstition is that your blood type is an indicator of your personality. Which is, I suppose, marginally more-likely to be true than star signs, because at least it could hypothetically have a basis in science. Still wrong, but at least you can see what they were thinking.

Many, many years ago, I found a service online that allowed you to change your star sign, for free. You basically filled in a form with your name and your chosen new-star-sign, and it’d give you a certificate that you could print out (or some HTML code to put on your GeoCities page or whatever… did I mention this this was a long time ago). I used the service, and for years afterwards joked that I had never been comfortable in the body of a Capricorn (I mean: financially prudent, pragmatic and mature‽) and was far better suited to my adopted sign of Aquarius (humanitarian, inventive, head-in-the-clouds – sound more like somebody you know). My ex- countered, saying that it wasn’t possible to change one’s star sign, and couldn’t see the hypocrisy of the statement.

Recently, somebody using my Free Deed Poll website asked me if they can use a deed poll to change their date of birth (hint: no, and don’t be stupid), and I was reminded of the change-your-star-sign website from so long ago. It’s gone down, now, but I have a half-hearted urge to recreate it. Perhaps for April Fools’ next year, or something.

Or maybe I’ll have forgotten about it and moved on to some other crazy idea. Aquarians, eh?

Surprises, e.g. a Brother-in-Law

Last weekend was an exciting and unusual experience, full of exciting (expected) things interspersed with a handful of exciting (unexpected) things. Let’s go chronologically:

Thursday/Friday – Mario, Magic, Marriage

I left work, picked up a rental car (having unfortunately forgotten to take my counterpart driving license to the rental place, I had the choice of either cycling for an hour to collect it or else paying a fiver for them to run a DVLA check, and I opted for the latter on the grounds that an hour of my time (especially if I have to spend it cycling back and forth along the same stretch of road) is worth more to me than a picture of Elizabeth Fry. I drove home, packed a bag, said goodbye to Ruth, JTA, and Annabel, and drove up to Preston.

There, I spent most of Friday playing the new Mario game with my sister Becky, gave a few small performances of magic (did I mention I’m doing magic nowadays? – guess that’ll have to wait for another blog post) at various places around Preston, and went out for a curry with my mother, my sisters Becky and Sarah, and Sarah’s boyfriend Richard. So far, so ordinary, right? Well that’s where things took a turn. Because as Becky, our mother, and I looked at the drinks menu as we waited for Sarah and her boyfriend to turn up… something different happened instead.

Sarah turned up with her husband.

It turns out that they’d gotten married earlier that afternoon. They’d not told anybody in advance – nobody at all – but had simply gone to the registry office (via a jewellers, to rustle up some rings, and a Starbucks, to rustle up some witnesses) and tied the knot. Okay; that’s not strictly true: clearly they had at least three weeks planning on account of the way that marriage banns work in the UK. Any case case, I’ve suddenly got the temptation to write some software that monitors marriage announcements (assuming there are XML feeds, or something) and compares them to your address book to let you know if anybody you know is planning to elope, just to save me from the moment of surprise that caught me out in a curry house on Friday evening.

So it turns out I’ve acquired a brother-in-law. He’s a lovely chap and everything, but man, that was surprising. There’ll doubtless be more about it in Episode 32 of Becky’s “Family Vlog”, so if there was ever an episode that you ought to watch, then it’s this one – with its marriage surprise and (probably) moments of magic – that you ought to keep an eye out for.

Saturday/Sunday – Distillery, Drinking, Debauchery

Next, I made my way up to Edinburgh to meet up with Matt R and his man-buddies for a stag night to remember. Or, failing that, a stag night to forget in a drunken haze: it’s been a long, long time since I’ve drunk like I did on that particular outing. After warming up with a beer or two in our hotel room, the five of us made our way to the Glenkinchie Distillery, for a wonderful exploration into the world of whiskies.

And then, of course, began the real drinking. Four or five whiskies at the distillery bar, followed by another beer back in the hotel room, followed by a couple more beers at bars, followed by another four whiskies at the Whiski Rooms (which I’d first visited while in Edinburgh for the fringe, last year), followed by a beer with dinner… and I was already pretty wiped-out. Another of the ‘stags’ and I – he equally knackered and anticipating a full day of work, in the morning – retired to the hotel room while the remainder took Matt out “in search of a titty bar” (a mission in which, I gather, they were unsuccessful).

Do you remember being in your early twenties and being able to throw back that kind of level of booze without so much as a shudder? Gosh, it gets harder a decade later. On the other hand, I was sufficiently pickled that I wasn’t for a moment disturbed by the gents I was sharing a room with, who I should re-name “snore-monster”, “fart-monster”, and “gets-up-a-half-dozen-times-during-the-night-to-hug-the-toilet-bowl-monster”. I just passed out and stayed that way until the morning came, when I went in search of a sobering double-helping of fried food to set me right before the long journey back to Oxford.

All in all: hell of a stag night, and a great pre-party in anticipation of next weekend’s pair of weddings… y’know, the ones which I’d stupidly thought would be the only two couples I knew who’d be getting married this fortnight!

Cosmo – Building A Watercooled PC (Part 1)

Recently, I’ve reduced my hours working at the Bodleian in order to be able to spend more time working on Three Rings and engaging in other bits of freelance work… and to increase my flexibility so that I can be available for childcare and to generally make things more-convenient for the other Greendalians and I. Unfortunately, on my very second day of this new working arrangement Nena (which I built in 2008) had her power supply blow up, which sort-of threw a spanner into the works. This, along with a scary recent hard drive failure in JTA‘s computer, I took as being a sign from the Universe that it was time to build myself a new PC to replace Toni, my primary box, and relegate Toni to be the new Nena. It was time to build: Cosmo.

Frame from the Basic Instructions comic "How to Justify Upgrading Your Computer"; click for full comic — This episode of Basic Instructions, which came out disturbingly close to the construction of Cosmo, somewhat parallels my experience. Click for full comic.

Given that I had a little cash to burn, I decided that it must finally be time to fulfil a couple of long-standing dreams I’ve had – things I’ve wanted to do when building my last two or three computers, but never been able to justify the expense. And so I set out to build my new “dream computer”: a beast of a machine which would present me with some fresh engineering challenges during construction. Key features that I wanted to include were:

Liquid cooling

Most computers are air-cooled: the “hot” components like the processor and graphics chipset are covered with a heatsink (which works just like the fins on a motorcycle engine: drawing heat away through contact with cool air) and, generally, a fan (to improve airflow over the heatsink and thus increase cooling). Air cooling, though, is inefficient (the transfer of heat from components to air isn’t very fast) and noisy (“hot”-running air-cooled computers are annoyingly loud), and so in my last few PC builds I’ve drifted towards using cooler and quieter components, such as processors that are overpowered for what they’ll actually be asked to do (like Tiffany2, who’s virtually silent) and all-in-one liquid coolers for my CPUs (like these ones, from CoolerMaster – note that these still have a fan, but the use of a radiator means that the fan can be large, slow, and quiet, unlike conventional CPU fans which spin quickly and make noise).

But I’ve always had this dream that I’d one day build a true, complete, custom water-cooled system: taking a pump and a reservoir and a radiator and cutting pipe to fit it all around the “hot” components in my case. The pumps and fans of water-cooled systems make them marginally louder than the quietest of fan-driven, air-cooled computers… but are far more efficient, drawing a massive amount of heat away from the components and therefore making it possible to pack more-powerful components closer together and overclock them to speeds undreamed of by their manufacturers. A liquid cooling solution was clearly going to be on the list.

Multi-GPU

And how to best make use of that massive cooling potential? By putting an extra graphics card in! The demands of modern 3D games mean that if you want to run at the highest resolutions, quality settings, and frame rates, you need a high-end graphics card. And if you want to go further still (personally: I love to be able to run Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3, or Call Of Duty: Ghosts at a massive “ultra-widescreen”, wrap-around resolution of 5760×1080 – that’s triple the number of pixels found on your 1080p HDTV), well: you’re going to want several high-end graphics cards.

Both ATI/AMD’s Radeon and Nvidia’s GeForce series’ of chipsets are capable of running in tandem, triple, or quadruple configurations (so long as your motherboard and power supply hold up, and assuming that you’ve got the means to keep them all cool, of course!), and as a result all of my last few PC builds have deliberately been “ready” for me to add a second graphics card, down the line, if I decided I needed some extra “oomph” (instead, I’ve always ended up with a new computer by that point, instead), but this would be the first time I’d actually design the computer to be multi-GPU from the outset.

SSD/RAID 1+0 Combo

Toni featured a combination of a solid-state drive (flash memory, like you get in pendrives, but faster) instead of a conventional hard drive, to boot from, and a pair of 2TB “traditional” hard drives, all connected through the perfectly-adequate SATA 2 interface. Using an SSD for the operating system meant that the machine booted up ludicrously quickly, and this was something I wanted to maintain, so clearly the next step was a larger, faster, SATA 3 SSD for Cosmo.

Anybody who’s messed about with computer hardware for as long as I have has seen a hard drive break down at least once, and JTA’s recent malfunction of that type reminded me that even with good backups, the downtime resulting from such a component fault is pretty frustrating. This, plus the desire to squeeze as much speed as possible out of conventional hard drives, made me opt for a RAID 1+0 (or “RAID 10”). I’d tie together four 2TB hard drives to act as a single 4TB disk, providing a dramatic boost in redundancy (one, or possbily even two drives can be completely destroyed without any data loss) and speed (reading data that’s duplicated across two disks is faster because the computer can be effectively “reading ahead” with the other disk; and writing data to multiple disks is no slower because the drives work at the same time).

A few other bits of awesome

Over my last few PC builds, I’ve acquired a taste for a handful of nice-to-have’s which are gradually becoming luxuries I can’t do without. My first screwless case was Duality, back in the early 2000s, and I’d forgotten how much easier it was to simply clip hard drives to rails until I built Nena years later into a cheap case that just wasn’t the same thing.

Another thing I’ve come to love and wonder how I ever did without is modular power supplies. Instead of having a box with a huge bundle of cables sticking out of it, these are just a box… the cables come separately, and you only use the ones you need, which takes up a lot less space in your case and makes the whole process a lot tidier. How did it take us so long to invent these things?

Needless to say, the planning about building Cosmo was the easy and stress-free bit. I shall tell you about the exciting time I had actually putting her together – and the lessons learned! – later. Watch this space, and all that!

“Uncle Dan”

A week ago, Ruth pushed a baby out of her body, completely upstaging my birthday and, incidentally, throwing all of our lives pretty much into chaos. Having gotten to the point at which she’d resigned herself to “being pregnant forever“, Ruth would have certainly been glad to have that stage over and done with, were it not for a long and painful labour followed by a torturous and exhausting birth.

Dan, Ruth, JTA and 'Tiny' in the delivery suite of the hospital. — If Ruth looks like she’s about to die of exhaustion in this photo, that’s because that’s how she’s feeling.

There’s a lot that can be said about the labour: a 38-hour crescendo of Ruth gradually and repeatedly finding levels of pain and tiredness that each seemed impossible, until she reached them. But Ruth has suggested that she might like to write a little about it herself, so I shan’t steal her limelight. What I can say is that I didn’t – and I don’t think that JTA, either – appreciate quite how emotionally draining the experience would be for the two of us, as well. There was a strange sensation for me about twelve hours in: a sensation perhaps most-comprehensible by our friends who’ve done emotional support work. That was: after watching somebody I love so much suffer so greatly for so long, I felt as if I’d somehow begun to exhaust whatever part of my brain feels empathy. As if the experience of supporting Ruth had served to drain me in a way I’d never fully experienced before, like when you discover a muscle you didn’t know you had when it aches after an unusual new exercise.

Forcep-marks still visible, the newborn takes an extended nap in a crib alongside Ruth's recovery-bed. — Forcep-marks still visible, the newborn takes an extended nap in a crib alongside Ruth’s recovery-bed.

Of course, after the ordeal we got to take home a little bundle of joy, who continues – despite now having a perfectly fabulous name of her own – to be referred to as “tiny”, even though her birth weight of 8lbs 12oz (that’s about 4kg, for those who – like me – prefer to think in metric) doesn’t really make that a very fitting nickname! Nor the amount of damage she did to Ruth on the way out, which also might be ill-described as “tiny”! She’s also often referred to as “the poopmachine”, for reasons that ought not need spelling out.

Dan, sitting in the sunlight, rocking the baby. — I’m smiling, because I don’t yet know that, within seconds of this photo being taken, she’s about to fill her nappy.

My employer was kind enough to give me paternity leave, even though I’m not the biological father (JTA is; and he’s very-much still in the picture!). I’d looked at my contract and discovered that the wording seemed to imply that I was eligible, stating that I’d be permitted to take paternity leave if I was about to become a father, or if my partner was about to give birth, the latter of which seemed perfectly clear. To be certain, I’d wandered along to Personnel and explained our living arrangement, and they just had looks on their faces that said “we’re not touching that with a barge pole; let’s just err on the side of giving him leave!” As a result, we’ve had all hands on deck to help out with the multitudinous tasks that have suddenly been added to our lives, which has been incredibly useful, especially given that Ruth has been spending several days mostly lying-down, as she’s been recovering from injuries sustained during the delivery.

Tiny in front of the new beta version of Three Rings. — If only we had some kind of way to set up a web-based rota of feeding, changing and comforting the little one…

Despite everything, we and the rest of the Three Rings team still managed to push the latest version into testing on schedule, though fitting in time for bug-fixing is even harder than it would be were we at our “day jobs” during the daytimes! It’s not that our little poopmachine takes up all of our time, though she does seem to take a lot of it, it’s simply that we’re all so tired! For the last few nights she’s been fussy about sleeping, and we’ve all lost a lot of rest time over keeping her fed, clean, and feeling loved.

Ruth snuggles with her baby. — Who loves boob? Baby does! Also, everybody else in the house.

For all my complaining, though, what we’ve got here is an adorable and mostly well-behaved little bundle of joy. And when she’s not covered in poop, shouting for attention, or spitting milk all over you, she’s a little angel. And I’m sure you’ll all be sick of hearing about her very soon.

Odd One Out?

While you’re tucking in to your turkey tomorrow and the jokes and puzzles in your crackers are failing to impress, here’s a little riddle to share with your dinner guests:

Which is the odd-one out: gypsies, turkeys, french fries, or the Kings of Leon?

In order to save you from “accidentally” reading too far and spoling the answer for yourself, here’s a picture of a kitten to act as filler:

Want a hint? This is a question about geography. Specifically, it’s a question about assumptions about geography. Have another think: the kittens will wait.

Okay. Let’s have a look at each of the candidates, shall we? And learn a little history as we go along:

Gypsies

The Romami are an ethnic group of traditionally-nomadic people, originating from Northern India and dispersing across Europe (and further) over the last millenium and a half. They brought with them some interesting anthropological artefacts of their culture, such as aspects of the Indian caste system and languages (it’s through linguistic similarities that we’ve been best-able to trace their multi-generational travels, as written records of their movements are scarce and incomplete), coupled with traditions related to a nomadic life. These traditions include strict rules about hygiene, designed to keep a travelling population free of disease, which helped to keep them safe during the European plagues of the 13th and 14th centuries.

Unfortunately for them, when the native populations of Western European countries saw that these travellers – who already had a reputation as outsiders – seemed to be immune to the diseases that were afflicting the rest of the population, their status in society rapidly degraded, and they were considered to be witches or devil-worshippers. This animosity made people unwilling to trade with them, which forced many of them into criminal activity, which only served to isolate them further. Eventually, here in the UK, laws were passed to attempt to deport them, and these laws help us to see the origins of the term gypsy, which by then had become commonplace.

Consider, for example, the Egyptians Act 1530, which uses the word “Egyptian” to describe these people. The Middle English word for Egypian was gypcian, from which the word gypsy or gipsy was a contraction. The word “gypsy” comes from a mistaken belief by 16th Century Western Europeans that the Romani who were entering their countries had emigrated from Egypt. We’ll get back to that.

Turkeys

When Europeans began to colonise the Americas, from the 15th Century onwards, they discovered an array of new plants and animals previously unseen by European eyes, and this ultimately lead to a dramatic diversification of the diets of Europeans back home. Green beans, cocoa beans, maize (sweetcorn), chillis, marrows, pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, buffalo, jaguars, and vanilla pods: things that are so well-understood in Britain now that it’s hard to imagine that there was a time that they were completely alien here.

Still thinking that the Americas could be a part of East Asia, the explorers and colonists didn’t recognise turkeys as being a distinct species, and categorised them as being a kind of guineafowl. They soon realised that they made for pretty good eating, and started sending them back to their home countries. Many of the turkeys sent back to Central Europe arrived via Turkey, and so English-speaking countries started calling them Turkey fowl, eventually just shortened to turkey. In actual fact, most of the turkeys reaching Britain probably came directly to Britain, or possibly via France, Portugal, or Spain, and so the name “turkey” is completely ridiculous.

Fun fact: in Turkey, turkeys are called hindi, which means Indian, because many of the traders importing turkeys were Indians (the French, Polish, Russians, and Ukranians also use words that imply an Indian origin). In Hindi, they’re called peru, after the region and later country of Peru, which also isn’t where they’re from (they’re native only to North America), but the Portugese – who helped to colonise Peru also call them that. And in Scottish Gaelic, they’re called cearc frangach – “French chicken”! The turkey is a seriously georgraphically-confused bird.

French Fries

As I’m sure that everybody knows by now, “French” fries probably originated in either Belgium or in the Spanish Netherlands (now part of Belgium), although some French sources claim an earlier heritage. We don’t know how they were first invented, but the popularly-told tale of Meuse Valley fishing communities making up for not having enough fish by deep-frying pieces of potato, cut into the shape of fish, is almost certainly false: a peasant region would be extremely unlikely to have access to the large quantities of fat required to fry potatoes in this way.

So why do we – with the exception of some confusingly patriotic Americans – call them French fries. It’s hard to say for certain, but based on when the food became widely-known in the anglophonic world, the most-likely explanation comes from the First World War. When British and, later, American soldier landed in Belgium, they’ll have had the opportunity to taste these (now culturally-universal) treats for the first time. At that time, though, the official language of the Belgian army (and the most-popularly spoken language amongst Belgian citizens) was French. The British and American soldiers thus came to call them “French fries”.

The Kings of Leon

For a thousand years the Kingdom of Leon represented a significant part of what would not be considered Spain and/or Portugal, founded by Christian kings who’d recaptured the Northern half of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors during the Reconquista (short version for those whose history lessons didn’t go in this direction: what the crusades were against the Ottomans, the Reconquista was against the Moors). The Kingdom of Leon remained until its power was gradually completely absorbed into that of the Kingdom of Spain. Leon still exists as a historic administrative region in Spain, similar to the counties of the British Isles, and even has its own minority language (the majority language, Spanish, would historically have been known as Castilian – the traditional language of the neighbouring Castillian Kingdom).

The band, however, isn’t from Leon but is from Nashville, Tennessee. They’ve got nothing linking them to actual Leon, or Spain at all, as far as I can tell, except for their name – not unlike gypsies and Egypt, turkeys and Turkey, and French fries and France. The Kings of Leon, a band of brothers, took the inspiration for their name from the first name of their father and their grandfather: Leon.

The Odd One Out

The Kings of Leon are the odd one out, because while all four have names which imply that they’re from somewhere that they’re not, the inventors of the name “The Kings of Leon” were the only ones who knew that the implication was correct.

The people who first started calling gypsies “gypsies” genuinely believed that they came from Egypt. The first person to call a turkey a “Turkey fowl” really was under the impression that it was a bird that had come from, or via, Turkey. And whoever first started spreading the word about the tasty Belgian food they’d discovered while serving overseas really thought that they were a French invention. But the Kings of Leon always knew that they weren’t from Leon (and, presumably, that they weren’t kings).

And as for you? Your sex is on fire. Well, either that or it’s your turkey. You oughta go get it out of the oven if it’s the latter, or – if it’s the former – see if you can get some cream for that. And have a Merry Christmas.

The Hardest Hangman

What’s the hardest word to guess, when playing hangman? I’ll come back to that.

Last year, Nick Berry wrote a fantastic blog post about the optimal strategy for Hangman. He showed that the best guesses to make to get your first “hit” in a game of hangman are not the most-commonly occurring letters in written English, because these aren’t the most commonly-occurring letters in individual words. He also showed that the first guesses should be adjusted based on the length of the word (the most common letter in 5-letter words is ‘S’, but the most common letter in 6-letter words is ‘E’). In short: hangman’s a more-complex game than you probably thought it was! I’d like to take his work a step further, and work out which word is the hardest word: that is – assuming you’re playing an optimal strategy, what word takes the most-guesses?

A hanged man being quartered by his executioner. — The rules of hangman used to be a lot more brutal. Nowadays, very few people die as a result of the game.

First, though, we need to understand how hangman is perfectly played. Based on the assumption that the “executioner” player is choosing words randomly, and that no clue is given as to the nature of the word, we can determine the best possible move for all possible states of the game by using a data structure known as a tree. Suppose our opponent has chosen a three-letter word, and has drawn three dashes to indicate this. We know from Nick’s article that the best letter to guess is A. And then, if our guess is wrong, the next best letter to guess is E. But what if our first guess is right? Well, then we’ve got an “A” in one or more positions on the board, and we need to work out the next best move: it’s unlikely to be “E” – very few three-letter words have both an “A” and an “E” – and of course what letter we should guess next depends entirely on what positions the letters are in.

A tiny fragment of possible states for the tree of three-letter words, in hangman. — There are billions of possible states of game play, but you can narrow them down quickly with strategic guessing.

What we’re actually doing here is a filtering exercise: of all of the possible letters we could choose, we’re considering what possible results that could have. Then for each of those results, we’re considering what guesses we could make next, and so on. At each stage, we compare all of the possible moves to a dictionary of all possible words, and filter out all of the words it can’t be: after our first guess in the diagram above, if we guess “A” and the board now shows “_ A _”, then we know that of the 600+ three-letter words in the English language, we’re dealing with one of only about 134. We further refine our guess by playing the odds: of those words, more of them have a “C” in than any other letter, so that’s our second guess. If it has a C in, that limits the options further, and we can plan the next guess accordingly. If it doesn’t have a C in, that still provides us with valuable information: we’re now looking for a three-letter word with an A in the second position and no letter C: that cuts it down to 124 words (and our next guess should be ‘T’). This tree-based mechanism for working out the best moves is comparable to that used by other game-playing computers. Hangman is simple enough that it can be “solved” by contemporary computers (like draughts – solved in 2007 – but unlike chess: while modern chess-playing computers can beat humans, it’s still theoretically possible to build future computers that will beat today’s computers).

Now that we can simulate the way that a perfect player would play against a truly-random executioner, we can use this to simulate games of hangman for every possible word (I’m using version 0.7 of this British-English dictionary). In other words, we set up two computer players: the first chooses a word from the dictionary, the second plays “perfectly” to try to guess the word, and we record how many guesses it took. So that’s what I did. Here’s the Ruby code I used. It’s heavily-commented and probably pretty understandable/good learning material, if you’re into that kind of thing. Or if you fancy optimising it, there’s plenty of scope for that too (I knocked it out on a lunch break; don’t expect too much!). Or you could use it as the basis to make a playable hangman game. Go wild.

The hardest three-letter hangman words: xxv, xxx, wiz, oak, vex, vox, aux, fox, yuk, www... — The hardest three-letter hangman words. “Sly” is particularly… well, sly.

Running the program, we can see that the hardest three-letter word is “xxv”, which would take 22 guesses (20 of them wrong!) to get. But aside from the roman numeral for 25, I don’t think that “xxv” is actually a word. Perhaps my dictionary’s not very good. “Oak”, though, is definitely a word, and at 20 guesses (17 wrong), it’s easily enough to hang your opponent no matter how many strokes it takes to complete the gallows.

The hardest four-letter hangman words: xxxv, quiz, jazz, zinc, faux, foxy, hazy, jibe, quay, buzz, gibe, guan, huge... — Interestingly, “oaks” is an easier word than “oak” (although it’s still very difficult): the addition of an extra letter to a word does not make it harder, especially when that letter is common.

There are more tougher words in the four-letter set, like the devious “quiz”, “jazz”, “zinc”, and “faux”. Pick one of those and your opponent – unless they’ve seen this blog post! – is incredibly unlikely to guess it before they’re swinging from a rope.

The hardest five, six, and seven-letter hangman words, including jazzy, quaff, foxed, foxing, queued, favour, vaquero, jazzier, quizzed... — “Hazing foxes, fucking cockily” is not only the title of a highly-inappropriate animated film, but also a series of very challenging Hangman words.

As we get into the 5, 6, and 7-letter words you’ll begin to notice a pattern: that the hardest words with any given number of letters get easier the longer they are. That’s kind of what you’d expect, I suppose: if there were a hypothetical word that contained every letter in the alphabet, then nobody would ever fail to (eventually) get it.

The hardest eight, nine, and ten-letter hangman words, including quizzing, puppyish, picklock, jazziness, pollywogs, cufflinks, humbuggery, juxtaposed, bucketfuls... — Some of the longer words are wonderful, like: dysprosium, semivowel, harrumph, and googolplex.

When we make a graph of each word length, showing which proportion of the words require a given number of “wrong” guesses (by an optimised player), we discover a “sweet spot” window in which we’ll find all of the words that an optimised player will always fail to guess (assuming that we permit up to 10 incorrect guesses before they’re disqualified). The window seems small for the number of times I remember seeing people actually lose at hangman, which implies to me that human players consistently play sub-optimally, and do not adequately counteract that failing by applying an equal level of “smart”, intuitive play (knowing one’s opponent and their vocabulary, looking for hints in the way the game is presented, etc.).

In case you’re interested, then, here are the theoretically-hardest words to throw at your hangman opponent. While many of the words there feel like they would quite-rightly be difficult, others feel like they’d be easier than their ranking would imply: this is probably because they contain unusual numbers of vowels or vowels in unusual-but-telling positions, which humans (with their habit, inefficient under normal circumstances, of guessing an extended series of vowels to begin with) might be faster to guess than a computer.

Word	Guesses taken	“Wrong” guesses needed
quiz	24	20
jazz	22	19
jazzy	22	18
quaff	22	18
zinc	21	17
oak	20	17
vex	20	17
vox	20	17
foxing	22	16
foxed	21	16
queued	20	16
fuzzy	20	16
quay	20	16
pinup	20	16
fox	19	16
yuk	19	16
vaquero	22	15
jazzier	21	15
quizzed	21	15
hazing	21	15
favour	21	15
yoking	21	15
quays	20	15
quark	20	15
joked	20	15
guyed	20	15
foyer	20	15
bumph	20	15
huge	19	15
quip	19	15
gibe	19	15
rump	19	15
guan	19	15
quizzed	19	15
oaks	19	15
murk	19	15
fezzes	19	15
yuck	19	15
keno	19	15
kazoo	19	15
Download a longer list (there’s plenty more which you’d expect to “win” with)

If you use this to give you an edge in your next game, let me know how it works out for you!

Update – 8 March 2019: fixed a broken link and improved the layout of the page.

Narrowboating

I’ve had a tardy summer for blogging, falling way behind on many of the things I’d planned to write about. Perhaps the problem is that I’m still on Narrowboat Time, the timezone of a strange parallel universe in which everything happens more-slowly, in a gin-soaked, gently-rocking, slowly-crawling haze.

That’s believable, because this summer Ruth, JTA and I – joined for some of the journey by Matt – rented a narrowboat and spent a week drifting unhurriedly down the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal… and then another week making a leisurely cruise back up it again.

We picked up Nerys, out of Cambrian Cruisers, who also gave us an introduction to the operation of the boat (driving it, filling it with water, pumping out sewage, generating electricity for appliances, etc.) and safety instructions (virtually all of the canal is less than four feet deep, so if you fall in, the best thing to do is to simply walk to the shore), and set out towards Brecon. In order to explore the entire canal in the time available, we needed to cover an average of only five miles per day. When you’re going at about two and a half miles per hour and having to stop to operate locks (there are only six locks on the navigable stretch of the canal, but they’re all clustered towards the upper end), though, five miles is plenty.

The upper end of the canal is by far the busiest, with not only narrowboats cruising up and down but a significant number of day boats (mostly on loan from Brecon) and at least one tour boat: a 50-seater that you don’t want to have to wiggle past at sharp corner North of the Bryich Aqueduct. From a navigation perspective, though, it’s also the best-maintained: wide enough that two boats can pass one another without much thought, and deep enough across its entire width that you needn’t be concerned about running aground, it makes for a great starting point for people who want some narrowboating practice before they hit the more challenging bits to the South.

Ruth was excited to find in me a driver who was confident holding the boat steady in a lock. Perhaps an expression of equal parts talent and arrogance, I was more than happy to take over the driving, leaving others to jump out and juggle the lock gates and lift bridges. Owing to Ruth’s delicate condition, we’d forbidden her from operating the entirely-manual locks, but she made sure to get a go at running one of the fancy hydraulic ones.

After each day’s cruising, we’d find a nice place to moor up, open a bottle of wine or mix up some gin-and-tonics, and lounge in the warm, late summer air.

As we wound our way further South, to the “other” end of the waterway, we discovered that the already-narrow canal was ill-dredged, and drifting anywhere close to the sides – especially on corners – was a recipe for running around. Crewmates who weren’t driving would take turns on “pole duty”, being on standby to push us off if we got too close to one or the other bank.

Each night moored up in a separate place gives a deceptive feeling of travel. Deceptive, because I’ve had hiking trips where I’ve traveled further each day than we did on our boat! But the nature of the canal, winding its way from the urban centre of Brecon out through the old mining villages of South Wales.

The canal, already quite narrow and shallow, only became harder to navigate as we got further South. Our weed hatch (that’s the door to the propeller box, that is, not a slang term for the secret compartment where you keep your drugs) saw plenty of use, and we found ourselves disentangling all manner of curious flora in order to keep our engine pushing us forwards (and not catching fire).

Eventually, we had to give up navigating the waterway, tie up, and finish the journey on foot. We could have gotten the boat all the way to the end, but it’d have been a stop-start day of pushing ourselves off the shallow banks and cleaning out the weed hatch. Walking the last few miles – with a stop either way at a wonderful little pub called The Open Hearth – let us get all the way to both ends of the navigable stretch of the canal, with a lot less hassle and grime.

It’s a little sad coming to the end of a waterway, cut short – in this case – by a road. There’s no easy way – short of the removal of an important road, or the challenging and expensive installation of a drop lock, that this waterway will ever be connected at this point again. The surrounding landscape doesn’t even make it look likely that it’ll be connected again by a different route, either: this canal is broken here.

I found myself remarking on quite how well-laid-out the inside of the narrowboat was. Naturally, on a vehicle/home that’s so long and thin, a great number of clever decisions had clearly been made. The main living space could be converted between a living room, dining room, and bedroom by re-arranging planks and poles; the kitchen made use of carefully-engineered cupboards to hold the crockery in place in case of a… bump; and little space-saving features added up all along the boat, such as the central bedroom’s wardrobe door being adaptable to function as a privacy door between the two main bedrooms.

On the way back up the canal, we watched the new boaters setting out in their narrowboats for the first time. We felt like pros, by now, gliding around the corners with ease and passing other vessels with narry a hint of a bump. We were a well-oiled machine, handling every lock with ease. Well: some ease. Unfortunately, we’d managed to lose not one but both of our windlasses on the way down the canal and had to buy a replacement pair on the way back up, which somewhat dented our “what pros we are” feeling.

Coming to the end of our narrowboating journey, we took a quick trip to Fourteen Locks, a beautiful and series of locks with a sophisticated basin network, disconnected from the remains of the South Wales canal network. They’ve got a particular lock (lock 11), there, whose unusual shape hints at a function that’s no-longer understood, which I think it quite fabulously wonderful – that we could as a nation built a machine just 200 years ago, used it for a hundred years, and now have no idea how it worked.

Our next stop was Ikea, where we’d only meant to buy a couple of shelves for our new home, but you know how it is when you go to Ikea.

We wrapped up our holiday with a visit to Sian and Andy (and their little one), and Andy showed off his talent of singing songs that send babies to sleep. I swear, if he makes an album of children’s songs and they’re as effective as he is in person, we’ll buy a copy.

Altogether, a wonderfully laid-back holiday that clearly knocked my sense of urgency so far off that I didn’t blog about it for several months.

Edit, 22 June 2018: after somebody from the Canal & River Trust noticed that my link to their page on the Brynich Aqueduct was broken after they’d rearranged their site, I removed it. They suggested an alternative page, but it didn’t really have the same content (about the aqueduct itself) so I’ve just removed the link. Boo, Canal & River Trust! Cool URIs Don’t Change!

Pen testing

This is not a blog post about pentesting, or any other kind of software-engineering inspired testing of pens. Nor is it a blog post about the kind of fascination some people have with pens and ink. Instead, this is a blog post about history and psychology.

Recently, JTA asked me what I do when I want to test a pen, and he was surprised with the answer. Before I tell you how I answered, I’ll tell you about what I learned from the conversation. And before that, I’ll tell you about the history of pen testing. And then, finally, I’ll tell you why I think it’s important from a psychological perspective.

The oldest surviving Probatio Pennae, or “pen test”, is of the Old Dutch words “hebban olla uogala”, and is stored in the Bodleian Library.

Historically, the “breaking in” of a new pen was called a probatio pennae, literally “pen test”, and would typically be a few lines of text or a short proverb: something that demonstrated the pen’s ability to write. For the entire mediaeval period, plus several centuries besides, the principle instrument for writing would be the quill pen: the primary wing feathers of a large bird such as a goose, often hardened in hot ashes, stripped of barbs, and cut down to size with an blade whose purpose lends its name to what we now call a “pen knife”. With such a tool, a scribe would want to be sure that the pen could hold an adequate nibful of ink without splashing or spraying, and – despite the high value of paper – it was clearly essential to write a whole sentence or two to be sure.

A modern ballpoint pen has no such issues, but instead introduces some of its own: a plastic-lined inkwell can be gradually penetrated by the air, causing the ink to dry up; the ball can become stuck and will not turn freely; air bubble can develop within the tube (especially if the pen is stored, or worse-still used, the wrong way up); and, of course, the pen can run out of ink. This typically precipitates its disposal: your biro isn’t built to be re-used for anything except perhaps to perform an emergency tracheotomy, and it’s cheap enough that you don’t want to waste your time repairing it. As a result, our pen tests have become fast, designed to determine within a few seconds whether the pen we’ve got is working or, in the case of a stuck ball, can be made to start working with a sufficiency of scribbling. Our culture of disposal can’t spare the time for any more than a cursory test before we give up and grab the next one.

Comic: A customer stands confused, holding a toaster, outside Melvin's Throw-It-Away-And-Buy-A-New-One-Shop (formerly Melvin's Fix-It Shop) — Why keep a pen? Why keep a toaster? Why keep a computer?

So what do we write? What is the probatio pennae of our times? It’s been widely-reported (although I can’t find any decent citations) that, upon being offered a new pen to try out, 97% of people will write their own name. Now that statistic smells fishy to me (no good citations anywhere, and 97% of people use 97% as their “virtually all” number, for made-up statistics), but I’ve been testing the hypothesis among friends these last few days, and I’ve gathered enough evidence to convince me that it’s probably the case that many or most people will write their own name to test a pen.

Somebody had presumably asked JTA what he wrote, earlier in the day, because he took the time to tell me that when he tests a new pen, he typically writes the word “hello”.

Now I find that pretty weird. Maybe it’s the software engineer in me, but to me the mark of a good test is that it covers all of the possible cases, in the minimal possible effort. Writing your name is easy because it’s managed by what is popularly-called “muscle memory”: a second-season episode of Castle (correctly) used this as a plot point, when a man suffering from retrograde amnesia was unable to remember his name, but was still able to sign his name because the act of signing it had been rendered, by years of practice, into his procedural memory, which was unaffected by his condition. But writing a word, like “hello”… requires a comprehension of language. Unless he’s tested enough pens to have built a procedural memory of writing “hello” to test pens, JTA’s test has a greater number of neural dependencies, which – with apologies to those of you who aren’t interested in automated software testing – produces what we’d call an unnecessarily “brittle” test.

Animation of a hand using a pen to write a name, "hello", and a scribble. — A demonstration of a handful of ways in which people test pens, in Animated GIF format.

Me? I just scribble, which my quick survey (and several comparable ones online) show to be probably the second-most popular action to test a pen. Scribbling, to me, simply seems like the minimal test path: the single simplest thing that can be done with a pen that will demonstrate that it’s fit for purpose. I don’t need to test that a new pen can write words, because – to me – writing words in particular is not a function of the pen, but a function of my brain! To me, the pen’s function is simply one of transferring ink to the paper, and any semantic meaning coming from the ink is a product of my intellect, not of the writing implement.

So why is this important? Well: I have a half-baked hypothesis that the choice of what to write with a new pen might be linked to other aspects of our psychology. When I’m developing a new template for a website, for example, I use lorem ipsum text and dummy placeholder images as filler (just occasionally, I’ll use kittens, because kittens are adorable). That’s because the absence of meaning to the words that appear (I don’t read Latin, and even if I did, lorem ipsum is frequently mangled) has no bearing on my comprehension of the design: and, in fact, it can sometimes be a benefit to be deprived of the distraction of legible content.

But I’d hypothesise that people who write words as a probatio pennae would be less-comfortable with illegible placeholder-text in a design than those who drew scribbles or signed their name. I have a notion, from my own experience, that the same parts of the brain that is responsible for judging the quality of a writing implement are used in the judgement of a piece of design work. Hey: maybe if that’s true, graphic designers should have their clients test pens out, in their presence, before they decide whether to use believable filler or lorem ipsum text in the designs they’d like approved.

Or maybe I’m way off base. What do you write when you test a pen?

The Ambassador’s Notebook (Murder Mystery)

Short version of the review: a few teething problems aside, we all had a wonderful time and we’d certainly consider a Daggerville game for our next murder mystery party. The characters were, on the whole, wonderful characters well-realised and fully-developed within the constraints of the genre, the twist was clever, there were moments of great hilarity (such as the point when we realised that there’d been a veritable conga-line of people stealthily following one another around the hotel), and the event built up to a fun and satisfying conclusion. I’d suggest that you all keep an eye on Daggerville in the future.

As implied earlier this week, this weekend Ruth, JTA and I had planned to host the latest in a long series of murder mystery party nights (a handful of which have been reviewed on this blog). Despite our earlier worries, we eventually filled the “missing” slots in our party with our friends Liz and Dean: exactly the couple we’d planned to fill it with in the first place, but they’d been painfully slow at RSVPing.

We’ve played a lot of murder mystery games over the years: we could probably be described as connoisseurs of the genre, and that might be worth bearing in mind when you read what we had to say about this particular event. To enumerate, there’s been:

The entire back catalogue of Paul Lamond‘s Murder a la Carte / Inspector McClue series
Several of D’Avekki Studios‘ Murder Mystery Party series
A game in which nobody was murdered by Freeform Games
And several murder mystery games that I’ve written: one in a “scripted” style, the rest in an “open” style

That said, this latest party really had the opportunity to cross the board, with Liz and Dean having never been to a murder mystery night before and (other) Liz and Simon having been to only a few. And to top it all off, we were working with a completely new game from a creator of whom we’d had no experience. What could be more exciting?

You see: I was contacted a little over two months ago, via my web form, by a Martin from Daggerville Games, a new murder mystery party provider of the “buy-and-download” variety. Upon visiting their website, I was immediately struck by some of the similarities between their signup form (which asks for player names to be associated with characters, genders to be chosen for characters whose gender can be selected based on the gender balance among the players, and email addresses to which invitations will be sent) and a prototype one of my own design, used in the construction of my upcoming games Murder at the Glam Rock Concert and Murder on the Social Network, the first of which we hope to host in about a year’s time. I mentioned this to Martin, in the hope that they won’t think I’m ripping them off if I eventually put some of my pieces online for the world to play, too.

The Daggerville folks, perhaps anticipating that I would be likely to blog about the event in hindsight and thus provide them with some free publicity, offered me a voucher for a free game of my choice, which I accepted. After a little discussion, we settled upon The Ambassador’s Notebook, a 7-player murder mystery set in a rural 1920s hotel and revolving around the untimely death of a Mr. Sullivan, presumably related to a valuable journal that was in his possession.

In order to keep the spoilers at the tail end of this blog post (there’ll be a nice big warning before you get to them, so you can refrain from reading them if you’re planning to someday play this game yourself), I’ll cut to the chase and first provide a summary of the night as a whole.

We all had a fun time: as usual for these gatherings, there was good wine, great company, and spectacular food (Ruth had, once again, put together a wonderfully thought-out and thematically-sound menu): honestly, under these conditions we’d be pretty-much guaranteed a good night no matter what. The murder mystery itself was a scripted affair similar to those you’ll find in any off-the-shelf kit, but with a few quirks. For a start, as hinted above, everybody gets their fragments of the script (along with dialogue entry and exit cues) very early on: it’s possible, permitted, and even encouraged that players read their script before they arrive for the event. Some of us were concerned that this might result in “spoilers”, and a few of those of us who did pre-read our scripts said that they regretted doing so, so be aware: it’s a spoiler-risk.

Unlike similar-styled games, though, players aren’t given additional information outside of the script, and we all felt that this made things challenging when it came to the discussion breaks. All that we had to go on for our deliberations was exactly what we’d all heard, just minutes before, tempered by our own speculation. Sometimes somebody would ask, or consider asking, a valid question after somebody’s whereabouts, alibi, or history, but no answer was forthcoming because all that we had, collectively, was the script. This caused additional confusion when, for example, Liz’s character mentioned JTA’s character by his first name, it was a surprise to everybody… even JTA, who had no idea to begin with that it was supposed to be his name!

None of the problems we experienced “broke” the game, and we found our way to a reasonably-satisfactory conclusion. A majority of us voted correctly, determining the identity of the murderer, and Ruth even managed to identify an important twist (albeit not based on anything more than speculation: the “flash” was a little subtle for us). There were a few anachronisms in the script, but they’re of the kind that only nerds like us would notice (the National Theatre is mentioned despite the fact that it won’t be founded for another four decades or so, and a character makes a reference to a frozen turkey, even though freezing of meat in the West wasn’t yet commonplace, for example). We’d have really liked to have each had a brief – even just half a page! – to tell us each more about our own characters (their names, for example, as well some of the secrets that they might be concealing and any established relationships they have with other characters), and if we knew that Daggerville were adding this feature, it’d make us far more-likely to buy their products in future.

The short review would be: a few teething problems aside, we all had a wonderful time and we’d certainly consider a Daggerville game for our next murder mystery party. The characters were, on the whole, wonderful characters well-realised and fully-developed within the constraints of the genre, the twist was clever, there were moments of great hilarity (such as the point when we realised that there’d been a veritable conga-line of people stealthily following one another around the hotel), and the event built up to a fun and satisfying conclusion. I’d suggest that you all keep an eye on Daggerville in the future.

[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Spoiler warning: reading beyond here could result in seeing spoilers. Don’t read on if you’re likely to ever take part in a game of The Ambassador’s Notebook.[/spb_message]

Aside from the lack of character “introductions”, another thing we found difficult in this game were issues in the script. The script for “The Neighbour” ended up one-number out of sync in the middle of Scene 2, where her ‘line 42’ indicated that a different person should be talking to what the rest of the scripts said. On another occasion, the script for “The Proprietress” seemed to be missing a line (although other characters had the ‘tail end’ of that line). The character of “The Journalist” can be played by a man or a woman, and although I selected “male” when I filled in the form, some of the scripts referred to the character as a woman! At first I thought that this might be related to difficulties some of us had had receiving the emailed scripts (Martin at Daggerville was incredibly helpful at sending out fresh ones, though), but we found at least one instance in which one person flip-flopped between referring to “The Journalist” as female or male!

(there’s a video I’ve put together of some of the highlights of our evening, but there’s possible spoilers in it)

Personally, though, my favourite moment of the night came right at the start, as we all introduced our characters. One of the Liz’s, an American, had decided to play her character as an American, and introduced herself as such. “Oh,” said the other Liz, whom she’d just met, “Are you going to do an accent?”

Wanted: Two Murder Suspects

We’re hoping to have a mini-murder mystery this Saturday, 2nd November, in Oxford, and after a series of people who can’t make it, we’re in need of two people to come along and play. If you want to come then, basically, you’re in, and we’d love to have you.

We’re looking for either two women or a man and a woman, but even if you haven’t got a “date” to bring, if you can make it then let us know and we’ll try to find somebody to fill the other gap. Just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you soon!

Pocket Searching

Pocket dialling was bad enough. I once received a phone call from a friend whose phone called me – as the last number he’d dialled – just as he was putting on a harness in anticipation of doing a bungee jump. So all I got to hear was rustling, and shuffling… and then a blood-curdling scream. Nice one.

But in this age of smartphones, the pocket search has become a new threat. Thanks to the combination of touchscreens, anticipatory keyboards (I use SwiftKey, and I’m beginning to think that it knows me better than I do myself), and always-online devices, we’re able to perform quite complex queries quite accidentally. I’ve got a particular pair of trousers which seems to be especially good at unlocking my phone, popping up a search engine, typing a query (thanks to the anticipatory keyboard, usually in full words), and then taking a screenshot and saving it for me, so that I can’t later deny having searched for… whatever it was.

This morning, while cycling to work, I searched for the following (which I’ve reformatted by inserting line breaks, in order to transform it into the sort-of poem you might expect from sombebody both insane and on hallucinogens):

thanks again
and it all goes on
and I will Also
Also A bit LIKE THAT
THE ANSWER is
That you are looking at your Local Ryanair
and a ripening
and a ripening
I can assure are a BIT
and see the new template by clicking here
for
for YOU GUYS
GUYS HAVE YOU ANY COMMENTS
ON MY WAY BACK FROM YOU
And the other side and I will have the same
as a friend or relative
relative humidity
humidity
to you
you are here car
car
and
and embarrassing
embarrassing
the best thing is the first three years and over
over?

Maybe my phone is gradually becoming sentient and is trying to communicate with me. I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

The Family Vlog

Those of you who’ve met my family will probably already have an understanding of… what they’re like. Those of you who haven’t are probably about to gain one.

It started on a weekend in April, when my mother and I went to a Pink concert. The support act were a really fun band called Walk the Moon, who finished their energetic set with I Can Lift A Car, with its’ catchy chorus hook “Did you did you… did you know know: I can lift a car up, all by myself?” Over the weeks that followed, perhaps because of its earworm qualities, this song became sort-of an inside Rickroll between my mum and I.

A series of text messages from me to my mum, telling a story about separating large and small particulates of granulated agar, and culminating with "I can sift agar, all by myself" - a clear reference to "I can lift a car." — For example, this Bel-Air-meme style text message used a shaggy dog story to deliver a play on words.

At one point, she sent me a link to this video (also visible below), in which she is seen to lift a (toy) car. My sister Becky (also known as “Godzilla”) was behind the camera (and, according to the credits, everything else), and wrote in the doobly doo: “I think I’m gonna start doing family vlogs.”

She’d experimented with vlogging before, with a short series of make-up tutorials and a “test video post” on her blog, but this represented something new: an effort to show off her family (and guest appearances from her friends) as they really are; perhaps this was an effort to answer the inevitable question asked by people who’ve visited them – “are they always like that?” Perhaps that’s why she chose the name she did for the Family Vlog – “IRL”.

At the time of writing, Becky (on her YouTube channel) has produced eight such videos (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight), reliably rolling out one a week for the last two months. I thought they were pretty good – I thought that was just because they were my family, but I was surprised to find that it’s slowly finding a wider reach, as I end up speaking to friends who mention to me that they “saw the latest family vlog” (sometimes before I’ve had a chance to see it!).

Me reviewing me reviewing my family, from Review 6. — As I was visiting Preston, I ended up featuring in “IRL – Week 6”. My review (click on the image for it), therefore, seemed to be equal in parts recursive and narcissistic.

Naturally, then, the only logical thing to do was to start producing my own YouTube series, on my channel, providing reviews of each episode of my sister’s vlog. I’ve managed to get seven out so far (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven), and I’d like to think that they’re actually better than the originals. They’re certainly more-concise, which counts for a lot, because they trim the original vlog down to just the highlights (interrupted only occasionally by my wittering atop them).

The widget above (or this playlist) will let you navigate your way through the entire body of vlogs, and their reviews (or lets you play them all back to back, if you’ve got two and a quarter hours to spare and a pile of brain cells you want killing). But if you’re just looking for a taster, to see if it’s for you, then here are some starting-out points:

The best review? Probably five or six.
The best episode? My favourite is six, but number two has the most views, probably the keywords “lesbian foursome” are popular search terms. Or possibly “girls peeing”. I’m not sure which scares me the most.
Of if you just want to drop-in and have a taster, start from the latest review.

Update: the family vlog now has an official website.