Just thought I’d briefly share all of the different ways I’ve been saying goodbye to Aberystwyth and the people there, along with some photos:
Goodbye Friends
I’d hoped to make a proper blog post about the barbecue/bonfire we’d had to “see of” JTA and I (and later Paul, who’s leaving later this year, and sort-of Ruth, who’ll now be visiting far less-frequently), but I decided to wait until Rory got around to uploading the photos he’d taken. He still hadn’t done so by the time I left town, so, you’re stuck with the handful of pictures
that I took.
Sam, both Rorys, Gareth, Jimmy and Claire
You can even see Rory on the right of that first photo, taking pictures, the swine. As usual for our beach barbecues there was no shortage of food nor booze, and a copious
quantity of firewood. Also a huge amount of paper and cardboard which needed disposing of before the move, which lead to one of the most violently spectacular beach fires we’ve ever had
– perhaps second only to the time that Kit, Claire and I found large parts of a bar (as in, one that you serve drinks over at a pub) and ignited it , many years ago.
Satoko and Paul
As the light grew dim I recited a poem that I’d thrown together earlier that evening, for the occasion, expressing my fondness for this place where I’ve spent the last decade or so. I’d
promised that I’d put it online, so here it is:
MEMORIES OF AN OLD FRIEND AND FORMER LOVER
In nineteen hundred and eighty five,
When I was – ooh – nay high. [with gesture sadly absent when recited over Internet]
I first set eyes on this Welsh town,
It’s mountains, sea and sky.
And beach (sans sand) and shops
(now closed), and pier (missing an end).
And thought myself, “This place, perhaps,
Could someday be my friend.”
Thirteen years passed – lucky for some –
And found me here again
In search of a place to come and learn
[I had a line here about how long it takes to get here by train, but I’ve lost it!]
My open day was sunny (aren’t they all?
how do they make it so?)
As I visited the campus and
The quaint town down below
That day, as I sat on that hill, [again with the gestures! – this was Consti, of course] looked down,
And saw a pair of dolphins play
I realised I’d found a friend: this town
And loved her, in a way.
My love and I were something sweet.
My friends; they envied me,
As she and I would come back, merry,
With a traffic cone or three.
Ten years I gave her of my life,
And treasure every one.
A decade’s love and hope and dreams under
Wales’ (intermittent) sun.
But this was young love: first love, p’rhaps
And wasn’t built to last,
And so the time draws swiftly near
That it becomes: the past.
The friend I’ll think of, as I chew
A slice of Bara Brith
She’ll always be here, in my heart,
Beautiful Aberystwyth.
In other news, you have no idea how hard it is to find fitting rhymes for “Aberystwyth”.
JTA
Goodbye Samaritans
Of course, I’d hoped to say goodbye to the Samaritans branch where I’d volunteered for the
last few years, and I’d hoped to do so at an upcoming curry night that had been organised at the branch. Little did I know that more than just an excuse to say goodbye, this little
party had been geared up almost entirely to see off Ruth, JTA and I. There were tears in our eyes as we saw some of the adaptations to the training room.
The Training Room at Aberystwyth Samaritans
The meal was spectacular, the beer and wine flowed freely, and we each left with a special gift showing how much the branch cared for each of us. I still have no idea how they managed
to orchestrate so much of this without any of us having a clue that we were letting ourselves in for more than just a curry and a pint or two.
As I left the branch for the last time, I passed the reminder sign that reads “Have you signed up for your next shift?” and thought, with a little sadness – no, no I haven’t.
Goodbye SmartData
As if there weren’t enough curry in my diet, the lads from SmartData and I went
out to the Light of Asia for a meal and a few drinks (during, before, and after) to “see me off”. This
felt strange, because I’m not leaving SmartData – at least not for the foreseeable future – but continuing to work for them remotely in my office on Earth that I’ve taken to calling “SmartData’s Oxford branch”. But this does mark the end of me
seeing them (at least in person) on a day-to-day basis, and it was also an excuse to catch up with former co-worker Gareth, who came along too.
I should have thought to take a picture.
Goodbye Claire
I couldn’t have felt like I’d said goodbye to my life in Aberystwyth without saying goodbye to Claire, who’s been a huge part of it for, well, almost eight years. She and I got together
one evening in my final week, there, to break apart the QFrames (the picture frames full of mementoes from QParty). It was a somewhat emotionally heavy time, but – I suppose – an
important part of getting some closure on our break-up, last year: if there was ever going to
be a part of me that was perpetually tied to Aberystwyth, it’d be the half-dozen picture frames full of photos and letters and gifts that represented “us” that I was lugging around.
Now, I’ve got to find something new with which to furnish the walls of Earth, and my housemates seem keen to help with this mission.
It’s been a long process – saying goodbye to everybody – but at least that’s the Aberystwyth chapter complete. Right: what’s next?
Ruth, JTA, and I have found our
way to Earth – our new home, in Oxford – after the most exhausting house move
I’ve ever done. Particular challenges in getting things to Earth included:
My mountainous quantities of stuff, and in particular the things that I own that are of awkward shapes for packing into a van, such as my bike, collection of wheelie-chairs, and the
more-challenging bits of furniture I own.
All the subsequent cleaning, tidying, repainting etc. that was required at The Cottage, most of which couldn’t be done until the van was loaded up. Huge thanks to everybody who
helped out with this monumental task.
The fact that we were also moving most of Paul’s stuff.
In order to minimise the number of van rentals we collectively need, we rented a large van and tightly packed into it as much as possible of Paul‘s possessions, too. Which, of course, meant more to load, unload, and fit in, as well as the logistical challenges of picking up things
from two different locations and still packing things in a logical (big heavy things at the bottom, fragile things in tight spaces, etc.) manner.
A Very Full Van
The journey: wow, it’s a long way from Aberystwyth to Oxford (or, in fact, from Aberystwyth to just about anywhere). Conveniently, it can be just a case of getting on the A44 and
heading East until you get there, as Earth is only a stone’s throw away from the “other” end of the A44, but it’s still a trip that drags on and on.
That I kept standing on sharp things: while loading the van (without shoes: there was my mistake) I managed to tread on a drawing pin which went right into the muscle at the ball of
my foot. While unloading at the other end, I managed to stand on an upturned nail which was longer than the drawing pin by just sufficient to counteract the thickness of my sole,
puncturing my other foot, too. I’m now limping.
But that’s only the beginning of the problems.
Paul’s room here on Earth looks just like his flat in Aberystwyth used to: full of boxes!
My Sister’s Mystery Illness
Arriving in Oxford, we were all exhausted, so Ruth, JTA and I worked on unloading the minimum possible amount from the van (enough that I’d have bedding to sleep on and that the
computers could be stored safely indoors) while my dad and Jenny – who’d been driving the van – went to check into their nearby B&B. Having reached our goal, Ruth, JTA and I sat out
in the garden of our new house with a beer each and, exhausted, congratulated ourselves on a successful day. Unloading the rest of the van could wait until the morning.
That’s when my dad reappeared on our doorstep, looking flustered. He’d just received work that my sister, Sarah, had just been rushed into hospital with excruciating abdominal pains,
and he needed the van back to get up to her in Preston ASAP. Quickly we formed a bucket chain and rapidly unloaded the entire van,
without regard to where anything belonged, into the garage, freeing up the van.
So, yeah: the garage is a little full, now.
Oh, and JTA stabbed me in the hand with a penknife. In order to remove those things which were roped-in to the van as quickly as possible, he began slicing through them with his Swiss
army knife, and, in a moment of ill communication about which of the ropes that I was holding needed cutting, he ended up gouging a big hole in my thumb. Which goes nicely with my
punctured feet, making me look like the result of the least-effective case of crucifixion ever.
My dad got away, and my sister seems stable and safe, by the way, although the hospital still aren’t sure what’s wrong with her.
Network Issues
An important part of my unpacking plan was to get my study set up so that I’d be able to get back to my day job – which
I’m working at remotely – as soon on Monday morning as possible. It was during this set-up that I discovered that I was completely unable to connect any VPN connections. This later turns out to be a fault in the latest firmware of the ISP-supplied router. For those of you not fluent in Geek: the magic Internet-box we were delivered wasn’t very good, and needs downgrading to
make it useful.
Not a problem, I think: I’ll just plug in my old router and configure it to work, instead. Great plan, sure, but unfortunately JTA’s desktop PC didn’t want to play nice with my old router, and took some kicking to get working. Meanwhile, I’d started experimenting on getting the new router
working, and before you know it, we’ve had half a dozen different (but similarly-named) wireless networks floating about, all with different passwords and settings, and nobody has a
clue what’s going on.
Magic Internet-box one, bottom right, hates me. Magic Internet-box two, on top of it, hates JTA. And yes, that phone does look familiar, doesn’t it.
Eventually, we got together an Internet connection that not only works for everybody but follows all of the standards we care about, and not just some of them, but it was one
more challenge than I’d have liked when I’d hoped to do a house move without taking any time off work. Which is in itself, it turns out, a silly idea. Next time I undergo this mayhem,
I’m taking at least a long-weekend to do it.
I’m sure there’s a lot more to say, but I’d better get back to work! The short of it is: I’m on Earth, and it’s mayhem.
There’s a film that I’m a huge fan of, called Primer. Since I first discovered it I’ve insisted
on showing it at least twice at Troma Night (the second time just for the benefit of everybody who didn’t “get it” – i.e. everybody – the first time). If you haven’t already seen it,
this post might be a little spoilery, so instead of reading it, you should warm up your time machine, go and watch the film, turn off the time machine, get into the time machine, come
out again right now, and then read its Wikipedia page until you understand it.
Then come back.
Time Travel in Primer. Click to embiggen.
Still with me? Right.
Why Primer is awesome, and why you should care
In Primer, the protagonists accidentally stumble across the secret of time travel and use it to cheat the stock market. The film isn’t actually about time travel or
science-fiction: it’s actually about the breakdown in the relationship between the protagonists, but it’s got some pretty awesome science-fiction in it, too, and that’s what I’d like to
talk about. The mechanism of time travel in Primer, for example, is quite fascinating: the traveler turns on the machine using a timer switch (turning it on in person risks the
possibility of meeting a future version of themselves coming out of the machine). They then wait for a set amount of time, then they turn off the machine, get into it, wait for the same
amount of time again, and emerge from the time machine at the moment that it was turned on.
This is a lot weaker than many of the time travel devices featured in popular science fiction literature, films, and television. It’s not possible to travel forwards in time (except in
the usual way with which we’re familiar). Travelling backwards in time takes as long as it took the machine to travel forwards through the same period, making long journeys impossible.
The machine has to be strategically turned on at the point at which you want to travel back to, reducing spontaneity, and it can’t be used again in the meantime without resetting it.
Oh, and the machine is dangerous and causes long-term damage to humans travelling in it, but that’s rather ancillary.
There’s a certain believability to the time travel mechanic in Primer that gives it a real charm. As far as it is explored in the film, it permits a deterministic
universe (so long as one is willing to be reasonably unconventional with one’s interpretation of the linearity of time, as shown in the diagram above), provides severe limits to early
time travel (which are great for post-film debate), and doesn’t resort to anything so tacky as, for example, Marty McFly gradually “fading out” after he inadvertently prevented his
parents from getting together in Back to the Future.
Marty begins to disappear. I love this film, too, but not even slightly for the same reasons.
Experiments in the Primer universe
I’ve recently been thinking about some of the experiments that I would be performing it I had been the inventor of the Primer time machine.
First and foremost, I’d build a second, smaller time machine of the same design. We know this to be possible because the first machine built by the protagonists is smaller than the ones
they later construct. I want to be able to put one time machine inside another. Yes, yes, I know that this is what the protagonists do in the movie, but mine has a difference: mine is
capable of being operated (power supply only needs to be a few car batteries, as we discover in the film) within the larger time machine. That’s right, I’m building a time
machine inside my time machine.
Experiment One attempts to explore the relativism of time. Start the larger time machine and warm it up. Stop the larger time machine. Start the smaller time machine.
Get into the larger time machine, carrying the smaller time machine, and travel back. Once back, turn off the larger time machine. Experiment with sending things
forwards in time using the second time machine (which has traveled backwards in time but while running, from our frame of reference). If objects inserted into it come out in
the future, before it is picked up, this implies that there might be a fixed frame of reference to chronology. It also indicates that it is possible to build a machine for the purpose
of traveling forwards in time, too, although only – for now – at the usual rate.
Experiment Two attempts to accelerate the rate at which a traveler can move forwards or backwards through time. Based on the explanation given in the movie, the
contents of the time machine oscillate backwards and forwards through the period of time between their being turned on and being turned off, for a number of repetitions, before
settling. If we are able to synchronise the oscillations of two time machines, one inside the other (by turning them on and off simultaneously, using timers attached to each and their
own distinct, internal, power supplies), might we be able to set up a scenario that, in X minutes, switches off, and we can get inside the inner machine and travel
back to the switch-on time in X/2 minutes? If so, what happens if we send such a two-machine construction back in time as in Experiment One – do we then have a “time accelerator”?
Experiment Three takes advantage of the fact that for an object within the field, an extended period of time has passed (during the oscillations), while from the
reference point of an external observer, a far shorter period of time has passed. Experiment with the use of an oscillating time period field to accelerate slow processes. Obvious
ones to start with are the production of biologically-produced chemicals, as is done in the film (imagine being able to brew a 10-year-old whiskey in a day!), but there are more
options. Processing time on complex computer tasks could be dramatically reduced, for example. Build a large enough time machine and put a particle accelerator in it, and you can
bring masses up to relativistic speeds in milliseconds.
Experiment Four is on the implications on spacetime of sending mass back in time. As we know, flinging mass in a direction of space produces an equal and opposite
acceleration in the opposite direction, as demonstrated by… well, everything, but let’s say “a rocket” and be done with it. Does flinging mass backwards through time produce an
acceleration forwards through time? This could be tested by sending back a mass and a highly-accurate timepiece, removing the mass in the past, and letting the timepiece travel back
to the future. The timepiece is checked when the experiment starts, when the mass is removed, and when the experiment ends. If the time taken for the second half of the experiment,
from the perspective of the timepiece, is longer than the time taken for the first half, then this implies that Newtonian motion, or something equivalent, can be approximated to apply
over time as well as space. If so, then one could perhaps build an inertia-generating drive for a vehicle by repeatedly taking a mass out of one end of a time machine, transporting it
to the other, and sending it back in time to when you first picked it up.
The scientific possibilities for such a (theoretical) device are limitless.
But yeah, I’d probably just cheat the stock market, too. At least to begin with.
I’ve written a program called PicInHTML, which makes web pages with concealed images which are shown when text
on the page is selected. What’s clever about these page are how they work: they’re a single file, with no dependence on images nor Javascript, and they work by leveraging the
little-used ::selected CSS selector. Each individual letter on the page is given a CSS class to associate it with the colour of a corresponding pixel in the source image, and
selecting the text changes the background colour to that pixel colour.
That’s a wordy way of putting it. Let’s try an example:
An example of a special page - selecting the text in this page reveals the Reddit alien. Click on the image to see the discussion about this example on Reddit.
Give it a go on any of the following pages. You’ll need to not be using Microsoft Internet Explorer, I’m afraid, as it doesn’t support the ::selected CSS
selector. All you have to do is select the text on the page to reveal the secret image!
If you’re interested in the mechanics of how it works, or you’d like to get a copy of the source code and have a play yourself, see my project page on PicInHTML. You could also try looking at the source code of any of the pages, above: they’re not too-hard to read, especially for
machine-generated code.
!
An example of a special page - selecting the text in this page reveals the Reddit alien. Click on the image to see the discussion about this example on Reddit.
It’s been said that Aberystwyth is like a black hole, and that once you’re sucked into it, you can never leave. Sure, it’s okay to fly-by, so long as you keep it at arms’ reach for,
say, three to five years… but if you get caught in the pull of the place, it becomes harder and harder to ever leave.
I realised this early on. When I visited Aberystwyth on a University open day, back in 1998, I was so impressed with the place that I came down for a second open day, in 1999, even
though I’d already decided that this was where I wanted to be. Later, after I’d settled down, I promised myself that no matter what, I’d get out of here before ten years was up. That was the personal limit, I’d
decided, to the strength of the emotional rocket boosters required to reach escape velocity once you’re spiraling into the Aberystwyth black hole.
It’s a nice place to live for a while, as anybody who’s spent any amount of time here knows. And I’m sure it’d be a great place to retire, too. But sooner or later it’s time to move on:
time to escape from the dodgy brownouts and the shaky
Internet access, to go somewhere where there are transport links and cinemas with more than one screen and shops that don’t close on Wednesday afternoon. Time to live in a place
where English is the only language of which a long-term resident is expected to have a working knowledge and where graduate salaries actually appear on the same scale as the national
average. Time, in short, to move on.
It feels like the end of a chapter. Give or take a few years, it feels like I’ve divided these almost-thirty years of my life into three distinct chapters, each set in a different
locale. Each new chapter feels like a fresh start, like opening a brand new diary for the first time, and each brings new challenges, new experiences, new friends, and new
opportunities. And that’s almost as exciting as it is terrifying.
For the greatest time, I never expected to be here this long. When I was doing my degree, I couldn’t have forseen that I would stay here for long after I finished my degree – perhaps to hang around in academia for a few more years, or perhaps not. But
by then I’d met Claire, and that was a game-changer for me: the end of her (extended) degree would have conveniently
put me close to my ten-year limit, but when she was offered the opportunity to stay on and do a PhD, funded, in the specific area of her choice, that gave me reason to rethink. Eleven or twelve years can’t be
so bad, can it?
Of course, after Claire and I broke up last year, my plans changed, and it wasn’t long after
then that I announced that I’d be leaving town
in 2010. I spent some time considering all of my various options for habitation, work, and the like, and it’s only this and last month that plans have really begun to become concrete.
So here’s the plan:
I’ll be leaving town in the first fortnight of next month, and moving to Oxford. There, Ruth, JTA and I (and later to be joined by Paul) will be living in
the house that we’re renting, a little to the North-East of the city. Ruth will still be working where she is now, and – confusingly – I’ll still be working primarily for SmartData, here in Aberystwyth. While everybody else in the world is looking at living where it’s cheap and working where it’s
expensive, I’m going to be doing exactly the opposite, at least for the time being.
That’s our new house! And for those of you of a The Sims-playing bent, there’s a floorplan below for you to print out. You’ll have to make your own dollies of the four of us to
play with in it, though. You freak.
I find myself filled with apprehension and anticipation at what seems to be an exciting new step forwards in my recent life, but also with an almost-overpowering sense of nostalgia for
everything that’s happened here in Aberystwyth. In a way, this blog so far represents precisely that – the Aberystwyth chapter of my life – the last decade. I’ve had some great times
with some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met: some of them since moved-on themselves, and others still here, caught in the Aber tractor beam. Packing up the remnants and
artefacts of my life here, it’s easy to let my mind wander, find my way back to all the things I’ve done and been.
It’s a happy chapter, overall. And this upcoming move, next month, is a fitting end. When you heard the tone, please insert the next CD to continue the story.
Oh, and now the important bit: we’ll be having a fire on the beach (probably including all of the furniture that we don’t want!) on the evening of Friday 28th May,
instead of Troma Night. This will be the “goodbye Dan & JTA (and Paul, later)” party – I’ll be around for another week and my final Troma Night in Aber, the following week, but
JTA will be gone. Anyway, I’d love to see you there, whoever you are. I’ll announce more details closer to the time through the usual text-message based channels, but if you don’t
usually receive those and you would like to come, leave a comment and let me know. Ta!
This afternoon, I passed my driving test. This was my second attempt, and I pretty much kicked arse, scoring 2 minor faults (one for undue hesitiation as I pulled out from a roadworks
stop on the way up Penglais Hill, and the second for insufficient use of mirrors at some point while moving out of the roundabout near Morrisons). So there we have it: I’m legally
allowed on the roads.
All of the best drivers pass on their second attempts. Or so my dad tells me. Why yes, he did pass on his second attempt: why do you ask?
I have so many other things I’m overdue to blog about, but that’ll do, for now. Time for a beer.
For those who couldn’t make it to Troma Night 300 on Friday, but don’t want to miss out on the
experience: here’s what you missed (along with lots of links to some videos for you to watch – note that some videos might be considered NSFW):
7:30pm – we had planned to kick off with some Flash Gordon: Space
Soldiers, in the traditional fashion, but we discovered that I’d misplaced my copy and so we instead had a few shorts from around the Internet, including:
8:00pm – in exaggeration of the tradition, everybody present threw a sponge across the room; meanwhile, simultaneously, Paul threw a sponge out of the window of the Commodore Cinema and clear onto
the roof of the nearby shopmobility scheme portacabin.
8:05pm – “Kit, order the pizza!” As was the case in years gone by, Kit – in
attendance by speakerphone – asked “What does everybody want?” and, via Scotland, relayed our order to Hollywood Pizza. Meanwhile, trololololololololololo man sang in the background (a comparatively recent tradition).
8:10pm – Matt in the Hat provided a video, “live by satellite feed”, that he’d
acquired with the help of “Travis” at Troma Studios, to introduce our first film:
We watched The Toxic Avenger IV: Citizen Toxie – one of my personal favourite Troma films
(hell, one of my personal favourite films in general)
9:00pm – The pizza arrives, and as a few of the more-squeamish attendees didn’t want to have to eat their pizza while watching people being dismembered (wusses), we
paused the film and watched a few more Internet shorts, this time of fluffy little cute animals:
10:30pm – Our second film again sees an introduction supplied by Matt in the Hat:
Matt’s video introduction – nobody, not even me, had seen
this video before it was shown at Troma Night, but it had us rolling on the floor with laughter. I’ve had to modify the video for YouTube (imagine that the pint of Guinness isn’t
there), which reduces its impact somewhat, but I hope that putting it online will afford those of you who weren’t there the opportunity to enjoy it almost as much as we did.
The Deadly Bees (MST3K edition) – a Troma Night classic and a particular favourite of Adam’s – he owns several different copies of this film. We have
some technical difficulties towards the end of the film and switch to the original version to finish off, but this doesn’t make the film any less awful.
12:10am – we wrap up with another screening of Matt’s introduction to The Deadly Bees, for those that don’t leave the room fast enough to avoid watching it again (the
cowards): the final frame is left as a freeze-frame on the screen until everybody departs
All-in-all a fantastic Troma Night by anybody’s account: a huge thank you to everybody who made it special by coming along, by taking part remotely, or by sending well-wishes (Kit’s blog post, Liz’s blog post, comments on my announcement).
It was particularly important to me to have a Troma Night like this one, as this is likely to be one of my last Troma Nights in Aberystwyth: as I indicated last year, I plan to leave Aberystwyth during 2010. I’m
currently looking into a possible window of opportunity that would give me the chance to move to Oxford within the next nine weeks, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll be around for
another dozen Troma Nights here. In some ways, Troma Night 300 was – for me – a send-off of the concept of Troma Night in Aberystwyth (although you can be sure that we’ll be kicking off
Troma Night Oxford once Ruth, JTA,
Paul and I are settled there).
In other news, Alec’s LiveJournal account has been mysteriously deleted: did anybody else notice that?
This Friday’s Troma Night will be Troma Night 300! It’s hard to believe how much time I’ve spent at this, our weekly film night. I wonder how many pizzas, in total, have been eaten? How
many awful films we’ve groaned at?
I’m planning that for this special Troma Night we’ll temporarily revitalise some of the old traditions. I’ve already been in touch with Kit, and he’s happy to phone in the pizza order for us (“Kit, order the pizza!” // <sighs> “What does everybody want?”)
in the traditional style. I’m hoping that Paul will be available to throw a sponge through a window (if he’s working, of
course, we’ll try to arrange for him to fling a sponge around the cinema projection booth while we simultaneously throw a substitute sponge at The Cottage). We’ll aim to start a little
early with a Flash Gordon short, for those who miss watching those before their Troma Night experience, too.
As for those of you who are no longer around, you’re welcome to join in from afar, too. Alec: why don’t
you buy yourself a four-pack of beer and drink exactly three of them? “Strokey” Adam: perhaps you can
arrange for somebody to molest you with unwanted physical contact on Friday evening? Liz: you ought to get
a date for the night, introduce him to all of your friends, and then never see him again. See: traditions are great!
In other news: if you haven’t yet played Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground), you should. It’s a fun,
puzzle-oriented piece of interactive fiction that’s full of charm, with a wonderfully lovable (and not your usual) protagonist. It’s a lightweight bit of adventuring that’ll take most
of you under an hour, so go play! Install Gargoyle (for Windows or Linux) for the
simplest-possible play experience, and have fun!
I sent a letter to Google, today. Click to see it in large-o-vision.
I my letter, I suggest that the search giant should add a feature to their UK search, as they already have to their USA search, that would provide the details of an appropriate emotional
support helpline service to people searching for suicide-related topics (such as “how to commit suicide”, etc.). This would provide minimal disruption to users merely interested in the
topic, but could potentially provide a critical lifeline to somebody in dire need.
This afternoon, like last year, we took the
opportunity to spend Easter Sunday hiding one another’s Easter eggs in the woods and then running around looking for them.
Paul & Rory
For some reason, this year Rory didn’t want me to be responsible for hiding his egg (something to do with his
eventually being found up a tree, last year), so I ended up hiding Adam‘s, instead. I didn’t even put much
effort into it: just propped it on a branch. This turned out to be a bad hiding place because Adam walked right back past it on his way back from hiding JTA‘s egg.
Adam's egg
Paul, meanwhile, hid my egg. He did a pretty good job of it, too, and eventually had to give me a couple of clues. “It’s
near Barking Up The Wrong
Tree,” he said, knowing perfectly well that this was a geocache that I hadn’t yet hunted for. I pulled out my GPSr and found the cache, and then started looking for my egg in the
vicinity.
Adam in a Forest
In a particularly special bit of hiding, Rory managed to hide Matt P‘s egg so well that he himself couldn’t
find it again. Eventually we all had to help hunt for Matt’s lost egg. Rory had helpfully taken a photo of the egg in it’s hiding place, but this photo was ultimately useless because it
depicted nothing more distinctive than “a wood”, which we were unable to see for all of the trees. I suppose that if we were trying to get to a particular spot and then ascertain that
we were in the right place, it would be useful, except for that fact that being in the exact right place would probably have been pretty obvious by the time we were standing on top of
an Easter egg.
Hunting for Matt's egg
Finally, Adam basically “tripped over” the hidden egg, and all was well.
Matt finds his egg!
All in all, it was a fabulous afternoon out, and a great way to work off all the calories of Ruth‘s
most-excellent Easter lunch (and just in time to be able to scoff down cakes and chocolate later in the afternoon).
Ruth, JTA, and Paul near the edge of the woods
In other news:
If you haven’t yet played the Flash game “Gravity Hook“, you should. Be warned, it’s kind-of addictive. Can anybody
beat my top score? (1642 metres)
For those of you following our fun little local geocaching craze, here’s the geocaching.com usernames of some Abnibberswho you might not yet know about:
It may come as a surprise to you that the stuff I write about on my blog – whether about technology, dreams, food, film, games, relationships, or my life in general – isn’t actually
always written off-the-cuff. To the contrary, sometimes a post is edited and re-edited over the course of weeks or months before it finally makes it onto the web. When I wrote late last
year about some of my controversial ideas about the ethics (or lack thereof) associated with telling children about Santa Claus, I’m sure that it looked like it had been inspired by the run-up to Christmas. In actual fact, I’d begun writing it six
months earlier, as summer began, and had routinely visited and revisited it from time to time until I was happy with it, which luckily coincided with the Christmas season.
As an inevitable result of this process, it’s sometimes the case that a blog post is written or partially-written and then waits forever to be finished. These forever-unready,
never-published articles are destined to sit forever in my drafts folder, gathering virtual dust. These aren’t the posts which were completed but left unpublished – the ones where it’s
only upon finishing writing that it became self-evident that this was not for general consumption – no, the posts I’m talking about are those which honestly had a chance but just didn’t
quite make it to completion.
Well, today is their day! I’ve decided to call an amnesty on my incomplete blog posts, at long last giving them a chance to see the light of day. If you’ve heard mention of declaring
inbox bankruptcy, this is a similar concept: I’m
sick of seeing some of these blog articles which will never be ready cluttering up my drafts folder: it’s time to make some space! Let the spring cleaning begin:
Title: Typically Busy Unpublished since: March 2004
Unpublished because: Better-expressed by another post, abandoned
In this post, I talk about how busy my life is feeling, and how this is pretty much par for the course. It’s understandable that I was feeling so pressured: at the time we were having
one of our particularly frenetic periods at SmartData, I was fighting to finish my dissertation, and I was trying to find time to train for my upcoming cycle tour of Malawi.
The ideas I was trying to express later appeared in a post entitled I’m Still In Aber. Yay, in a much more-optimistic form.
Title: Idloes, Where Art Thou? Unpublished since: June 2004
Unpublished because: Got distracted by rebuilding the web server on which my blog is hosted, after a technical fault
In anticipation of my trip to Malawi, I was prescribed an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, which – in accordance with the directions – I began taking daily doses of several weeks before travelling.
It seemed silly in the long run; I never even saw a single mosquito while I was over there, but better safe than sorry I suppose. In any case, common side-effects of Lariam include
delusions, paranoia, strange dreams, hallucinations, and other psychological
effects. I had them in spades, and especiallytheweirdtrippydreams.
This blog post described what could have been one of those dreams… or, I suppose, could have just been the regular variety of somewhat-strange dream that isn’t uncommon for me. In the
dream I was living back in Idloes, a tall Aberystwyth townhouse where I’d rented a room during 2002/2003. In the dream, the house caught fire one night, and my landlady, Anne, was
killed. Apparently the fire was started by her electric blanket.
Title: Are We Alone In The Universe? Unpublished since: March 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, beaten to the punchline
Here’s an example of an article that I went back to, refining and improving time and time again over a period of years, but still never finished. I was quite pleased with the
direction it was going, but I just wasn’t able to give it as much time as it needed to reach completion.
The Drake Equation
In the article, I examine the infamous Drake Equation, which estimates the likelihood of
there being intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy (more specifically, it attempts to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations “out there”). Which is all well and good, but
the only way to put the formula into practice is to effectively pull unknowable numbers out of the air and stuff them into the equation to get, in the end, whatever answer you like. The
only objective factors in the entire equation are those relating to the number of stars in the galaxy, and everything else is pure conjecture: who honestly thinks that they can estimate
the probability of any given species reaching sentience?
The post never got finished, and I’ve since seen other articles, journals, and even stand-up comedians take apart the Drake Equation in a similar way to that which I intended, so I
guess I’ve missed the boat, now. If you want to see the kind of thing I was working on, here it is
but better-written. I wonder what the probability is that a blog post will never end up being published to the world?
Title: Why Old People Should Be Grumpy Unpublished since: October 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, possibly bullshit
In this post, I put forward a theory that grumpy old people are a positive sign that a nation is making just enough change to not be stagnant: something about the value of
keeping older people around crossed with the importance of taking what they say with a pinch of salt, because it’s not them that has to live in the world of tomorrow. I can’t even
remember what the point was that I was trying to make, and my notes are scanty, but I’m sure it was a little bit of a one-sided argument for social change with an underdeveloped
counter-argument for social stability.
In any case, I left it for years and eventually gave up on it.
Title: The Games That Didn’t Make The List Unpublished since: July 2007
Unpublished because: I could have kept refining it forever and still never finish it
After my immensely popular list of 10 Computer Games That
Stole My Life, I received a great deal of feedback – either as direct feedback in the form of comments or indirectly in other people’s blogs. Reading through this feedback got me
thinking about computer games that had stolen my life which I hadn’t mentioned. Not wanting to leave them out, I put together a list of “games that didn’t make the list”: i.e.
games which could also have been said to steal my life, but which I didn’t think of when I wrote my original top ten. They included:
Castles and Castles 2
The original Castles was one of the first non-free PC computer games I ever
owned (after Alley Cat, that golf game, and the space
command/exploration game whose name I’ve been perpetually unable to recall). It was a lot of fun; a well-designed game of strategy and conquest. Later, I got a copy of Castles 2 – an early CD-ROM title, back before developers knew quite what to
do with all that space – which was even better: the same castle-building awesomeness but with great new diplomacy and resource-management exercises, as well as siege engines and the
ability to launch your own offensives. In the end, getting Civilization later in the same year meant that it stole more of my time, but I still sometimes dig out Castles 2 and
have a quick game, from time to time.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates!
Early during the development of Three Rings, I came across an existing company with the name Three Rings Design, based in the
US. Their major product is a game called Yohoho! Puzzle
Pirates, an MMOG in which players –
as pirates – play puzzle games in order to compete at various tasks (you know, piratey tasks: like sailing, drinking, and swordfighting). Claire and I both got quite deeply involved during the beta, and played extensively, even forming our own crew, The Dastardly Dragons, at one point,
and met some fascinating folks from around the world. When the beta came to an end we both took advantage of a “tester’s bonus” chance to buy lifetime subscriptions, which we both
barely used. Despite the fact that I’ve almost never played the game since then, it still “stole my life” in a quite remarkable way for some time, and my experience with this (as well
as with the Ultima Online beta, which I participated in many years earlier) has
shown me that I should never get too deeply involved with MMORPGs again, lest they take over my life.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
As a Civilization fan, I leapt on the chance to get myself a copy of Alpha
Centauri, and it was awesome. I actually pirated my first copy of the game, copying it from a friend who I studied with, and loved it so much that I wrapped up the cash value of
the game in an envelope and sent it directly to the development team, asking them to use it as a “beer fund” and have a round on me. Later, when I lost my pirated copy, I bought a
legitimate copy, and, later still, when I damaged the disk, bought another copy, including the (spectacular) add-on pack. Alpha Centauri is the only game I’ve ever loved so
much that I’ve paid for it three times over, despite having stolen it, and it was worth every penny. Despite its age, I still sometimes dig it out and have a game.
Wii Sports Tennis – Target Training
Perhaps the most recent game in the list, this particular part of the Wii
Sports package stole my life for weeks on end while I worked up to achieving a coveted platinum medal at it, over the course of several weeks. I still play it once in a while:
it’s good to put on some dance music and leap around the living room swinging a Wiimote to the beat.
Rollercoaster Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
In the comments to my original post, Rory reminded me of these games which stole my life during my
first couple of years at University (and his, too!). RCT2, in
particular, ate my time for years and still gets an occassional play out of me – but was pipped to the post by OpenTTD, of course.
X-COM series
Another series of games which hooked me while I was young and stayed with me as I grew, the X-COM series (by which – of course – I mean Enemy Unknown, Terror From The Deep, and Apocolypse; not Interceptor and certainly not that
modern travesty, Aftermath). Extremely difficult, each of them took me months or years before I completed them, and I’ve still never finished Apocalypse on anything higher that the
lowest-two difficulty settings.
I wanted to write more and include more games, but by the time I’d made as much progress as I had, above, the moment felt like it had passed, so I quietly dropped the post. I suppose
I’ve now shared what I was thinking, anyway.
Title: Rational Human Interaction Unpublished since: September 2007
Unpublished because: Too pretentious, even for me; never completed
I had some ideas about how humans behave and how their rationality and their emotions can conflict, and what this can mean. And then I tried to write it down and I couldn’t find a happy
medium between being profound and insightful and being obvious and condescending. Later, I realised that I was tending towards the latter and, besides, much of what I was writing was
too self-evident to justify a blog post, so I dropped it.
Title: Long Weekend Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Too long, too wordy, and by the time it was nearing completion it was completely out of date
This post was supposed to be just an update about what was going on in my life and in and around Aber at the time. But as anybody who’s neglected their blog for more than a little while
before may know, it can be far too easy to write about everything that’s happened in the interim, and as a result end up writing a blog post that’s so long that it’ll never be
finished. Or maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the highlights of the post – which is all that it should have consisted of, ultimately – were as follows:
It was the Easter weekend on 2008, and town had gone (predictably) quiet, as many of my friends took the opportunity to visit family elsewhere, and there was a particular absence of
tourists this year. Between Matt being in Cornwall, Sarah being out-of-town, and Ruth, JTA, Gareth and Penny off skiing (none of them wrote anything about it, so no
post links there), it felt a little empty at our Easter Troma Night, which was rebranded a Troma Ultralite as it had only two of the requisite four people present: not even the three
needed for a Troma Lite! Similarly, our Geek Night only had four attendees (but that did include Paul, unusually).
Claire and I took a dig through her wardrobe about found that of the skirts and dresses that she famously never
wears, she owns over two dozen of them. Seriously.
I played and reviewed Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, which turned out to be a second-rate
first-person shooter with a reasonably clever alternate history slant. I’m a fan of alternate histories in video games, so this did a good job of keeping me amused over the long bank
holiday weekend.
Paul and I were arranging for a beach-fire-barbeque with Ruth and JTA when they got back, to which we even anticipated attendence from the often-absent not-gay-Gareth.
And finally, I had something to say about Jimmy‘s recent experiences in Thailand, but that’s as far as my draft went and I don’t
remember what I had planned to say…
Title: Confused And Disoriented Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Having received mixed feedback about my more-unusual dreams over the years, I’ve taken to blogging about a great number
of them in order to spread the insanity and let others comment on quite how strange my subconscious really is. This was to be one of those posts, and it catalogued two such unusual
dreams.
In the first, I was at my grandma’s funeral (my grandma had died
about two years earlier). A eulogy was given by both my mum and – confusingly – by Andy R. Afterwards,
the crowd present booed them.
In the second, I revisited a place that I’ve dreamed of many times before, and which I think is a reference to some place that I found as a young child, but have never been
able to determine the location of since. In this recurring theme I crawl through a tunnel (possibly of rock, as in a ruined castle) to reach a plateau (again, ruined castle-like), from
which I am able to shuffle around to a hidden ledge. I have such vivid and strong memories of this place, but my faith in my own memory is shaken by the very “dreamlike” aspects of the
event: the tunnel, the “secret place”, as well as the fact that it has appeared in my dreams time and time again for over 15 years. Perhaps it never existed at all: memory is a fragile
and malleable thing, and it’s possible that I made it up entirely.
Some parts of it are less dream-like. For example, I’m aware that I’ve visited this place a number of times at different ages, and that I found it harder to fit through the tunnel to
re-visit my secret childhood hiding place when I was older and larger.
A few years ago, I spoke to my mum about this dream, and described the location in great detail and asked where it might be, and she couldn’t think of anywhere. It’s strange to have
such a strong and profound memory that I can’t justify through the experience of anybody else, and which consistently acts as if it were always just a dream. Maybe it’s real, and maybe
it isn’t… but it’s beginning to sound like I’ll never know for sure.
Title: The Code In The School Unpublished since:May 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Another dream, right after Troma Night 219, where it seems that the combination of the beer and the trippy nature of the films we watched inspired my brain to run off on a tangent of
it’s own:
In the dream, I was visiting a school as an industrialist (similarly to how I had previously visited Gregynog on behalf of the Computer Science department at Aberystwyth University in 2005,
2006 and 2007). While
there, I was given a challenge by one of the other industrialists to decipher a code represented by a number of coloured squares. A basic frequency analysis proved of no value because
the data set was too small, but I was given a hint that the squares might represent words (sort of like early maritime signal flags). During mock interviews with the students, I used the challenge as a test, to see if I
could get one of them to do it for me, without success. Later in the dream I cracked the message, but I’m afraid I didn’t make a record of how I did so or what the result was.
A particularly famous message represented in maritime signal flags (click for bigger version)
Title: Absence
Unpublished since: May 2008
Unpublished because: Forgotten about; abandoned
At the beginning of the long, hot summer of 2008, I wrote about the immenent exodus of former students (and other hangers-on) from Aberystwyth, paying particular attention to Matt P and to Ele, who left for good at
about this time. And then I forgot that I was writing about it. But Matt
wrote about leaving and Ele wrote about being away, anyway, so I guess my post rapidly became redundant, anyway.
Title: =o( Unpublished since: June 2008
Unpublished because: Too negative; unfinished
I don’t even know what I was complaining about, but essentially this post was making an excuse to mope for a little while before I pull myself together and get things fixed. And that’s
all that remains. It’s possible that it had something to do with this blog post,
but without context I’ve no idea what that one was about, too. Sounds like it was about an argument, and so I’m happier just letting it go, whatever it was, anyway.
Title: Spicy Yellow Split Pea Soup Unpublished since: November 2008 Unpublished because: Got lazy; unfinished
I came up with a recipe for a delicious spicy yellow split pea soup, and wanted to share it with you, so I made myself the stub of a blog entry to remind myself to do so. And then I
didn’t do so. Now I don’t even remember the recipe. Whoops!
In any case, the moral is that pulses make great soup, as well as being cheap and really good for you, and are especially tasty as the days get shorter and winter tightens it’s icy
grip. Also that you shouldn’t leave just a title for a blog post for yourself and expect to fill it in afterwards, because you won’t.
Title: (untitled) Unpublished since: December 2008
Unpublished because: Too busy building, configuring, and working on my new PC, ironically
December is, according to Rory, the season for hardware failures, and given that alongside his troubles, Ruth’s laptop died and Paul’s computer started overheating, all at the same time, perhaps he’s
right. So that’s when my long-serving desktop computer, Dualitoo, decided to kick the bucket as well. This was a particularly awkward time, as I was due to spend a weekend
working my arse off towards a Three Rings deadline. Thankfully, with the help of friends
and family, I was able to pull forward my plans to upgrade anyway and build myself a new box, Nena (which I continue to use to this day).
I began to write a blog post about my experience of building a computer using only local shops (I was too busy to be able to spare the time to do mail order, as I usually would), but I
was unfortunately too busy building and then using – in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet my deadline – my new computer to be able to spare time to blogging.
But I did learn some valuable things about buying components and building a mid-to-high spec computer, in Aberystwyth, all in one afternoon:
Daton Computers are pretty much useless. Actual exchange:
“Hi, I need to buy [name of component], or another [type of component] with [specification of component].”
“Well, you’ll need to bring your computer in for us to have a look at.”
“Umm; no – I’m building a computer right now: I have [other components], but I really need a [name of component] or something compatible – can you help?”
“Well, not without looking at the PC first.”
“WTF??? Why do you need to look at my PC before you can sell me a [type of component]?”
“So we can tell what’s wrong.”
“But I know what’s wrong! I only took the shrink-wrap off the [other components] this morning: all I need is a [type of component], because I don’t have one! Now can
you sell one to me or not?”
“Well, not without -”
/Dan exits/
Crosswood Computers are pretty much awesome. Actual exchange:
“Hi, remember me? I was in here this morning.”
“Yeah: how’s the rebuild going?”
“Not bad, but I’ve realised that I’m short by a [type of cable]: do you sell them?”
“We’re out of stock right now, but I’ve got some left-over ones in the back; you can have one for free.”
/Dan wins/
It’s possible to do this, but not recommended. The local stores, and in particular Crosswood, are great, but when time allows it’s still preferable to do your component-shopping
online.
I later went on to write more about Nena, when I had the time.
Title: Child Porn Unpublished since: April 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; too much work in writing this article
I had planned to write an article about the history of child pornography, starting well before Operation Ore and leading up to the present day, and to talk about the vilification of paedophiles (they’re the new terrorists!) – to
the point where evidence is no longer as important as the severity of the alleged crime (for particularly awful examples of this kind of thinking, I recommend this article). I’m all in favour of the
criminalisation of child abuse, of course, but I think it’s important that people understand the difference between the producers and the consumers of child porn, as far as a
demonstrable intent to cause harm is concerned.
Anyway, the more I read around the subject, the more I realised that nothing I could write would do justice to the topic, and that others were already saying better what I was thinking,
so I abandoned the post.
Title: 50 Days On An EeePC 1000 Unpublished since: May 2009
Unpublished because: By the time I was making progress, it had been more like 150 days
Earlier in the year, I’d promised that I’d write a review of
my new notebook, an Asus EeePC 1000. I thought that a fun and engaging way
to do that would be to write about the experience of my first 50 days using it (starting, of course, with reformatting it and installing a better operating system than the one provided
with it).
Of course, by the time I’d made any real progress on the article, it
was already well-past 50 days (in fact, I’d already changed the title of the post twice, from “30 Days…” to “40 Days…” and then again to “50 Days…”). It’s still a great laptop, although
I’ve used it less than I expected over the last nine months or so (part of my original thinking was to allow me to allow Claire to feel like she’d reclaimed the living room, which was
being taken over by Three Rings) and in some ways it’s been very-recently superceded by my awesome
mobile phone.
Title: El De-arr Unpublished since: September 2009
Unpublished because: Too waffley; couldn’t be bothered to finish it; somewhat thrown by breaking up with Claire
Over the years I’ve tried a handful of long-distance romantic relationships, and a reasonable number of short-distance ones, and, in general, I’ve been awful at the former and far
better at the latter. In this blog post I wrote about my experience so far of having a long-distance relationship with Ruth and what was making it work (and what was challenging).
I’m not sure where I was going with it in the first place, but by the time Claire and I broke
up I didn’t have the heart to go back into it and correct all of the references to her and I, so I dropped it.
Title: Knowing What I’m Talking About Unpublished since: October 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; got distracted by breaking up with Claire
On the tenth anniversary since I started doing volunteer work for emotional support helplines (starting with a Nightline, and most recently for Samaritans), I wrote about a talk I gave at BiCon 2009 on the subject of “Listening Skills for Supporting Others”. It was a little under-attended but
it went well, and there was some great feedback at the end of it. I’d helped out with a workshop entitled “Different Approaches to Polyamory” alongside fire_kitten, but strangely it was this, the workshop whose topic should be that which I have the greater
amount of experience in, that made me nervous.
This blog post was supposed to be an exploration of my personal development over the previous decade and an examination of what was different about giving this talk to giving
countless presentations at helpline training sessions for years that made me apprehensive. I think it could have been pretty good, actually. Unfortunately a lot of blog posts started
around this time never ended up finished as I had other concerns on my plate, but I might come back to this topic if I give a similar presentation at a future conference.
So there we have it: a big cleanse on my perpetually unfinished blog posts. I’ve still got about eight drafts open, so there’s a reasonable chance that I might finish some of them, some
day: but failing that, I’ll wait until another decade or so of blogging is up and I’ll “purge” them all again, then.
And if you had the patience to read all of these – these “17 blog posts in one” – well, thanks! This was more about me than about you, so I don’t mind that plenty of you will have just
scrolled down to the bottom and read this one sentence, too.
After JTA and I’s monster plan for a great April Fools’ joke got rained-off this year (maybe another year), I just
had to go ahead with two smaller April Fools’ gags this year.
The Photocopier Prank (click for full-size)
The Photocopier Prank
A nice simple joke at the expense of the people in the office building I work in (and far less complex than last year’s prank against the same): I found a document online, printed it
out, and stuck it to the photocopiers.
It instructs users that the photocopier has been upgraded with voice controls, so you can just “tell it” to copy, collate, staple etc. and it’ll follow your instructions. The document
goes on to explain that it’s in “learning mode” right now and it might not get everything right while it learns your voice, so be patient and take the time to repeat yourself slowly and
carefully.
I haven’t got eyes on the copier, so I’ve no idea how many – if any – people it caught.
The Abnib Announce/Joke Of The Week Prank
For the last few years, I’ve run two a text-message based mailing lists (I’ve got unlimited texts as part of my mobile contract, so it’s as-good-as free for me to do this). The first,
Abnib Announce, lets people in Aber know about Troma Night, Geek Night, and similar events. The second, Joke of the Week, goes to a far wider audience and shares, every Friday, the best
(by a loose and arguable definition of the word) of the jokes I’ve heard over the previous seven days.
This morning I sent out the following message to both lists:
Abnib Announce/Joke of the Week Update:
Bad news, everyone. My network has been in touch to say that running these regular bulk SMS lists is a violation of their Fair Use agreement, so I can’t run them from my “free texts”
package any more. The good news is they’ve offered an alternative. These lists will now become subscription-based SMS services. This will cost you no more than 15p per message
received, and a maximum of £1 per week (so £2 per week if you’re on both lists). I’m supposed to ask for your permission before subscribing your number, but I know you’ll all agree
anyway. If for some reason you DON’T want to continue receiving Joke of the Week or Abnib Announce at 15p per message, please text me back BEFORE the first message, this afternoon.
Ta!
I’ve had a handful of great responses, so far, including:
Nice try.x
Them: The rotters, what a bargain, keep the jokes coming please sir
Me: Seriously? When I made up those prices this April Fools’ Day I should have put them higher!
Them: Hahaha, got me, first one too. Love to the crew
Halfway through a serious response to this i remembered what day it is…
April fool?
Totally not falling for that, sorry! Happy April Fools
Them: Hey dan. Sorry i cant do that on my phone as my mum Pays my contract
Me: Happy April Fools’!
Them: Hee.very good
Them: I dont want to pay thanks. I have enough problems with arguing with orange over my phone bill at the minute, thanks. Hope you are good.
Me: April Fools’!
Them: Is it april already?! Damn i fell for it again! Nice one :-)
Them: Take me off the lists please! Ill get info from [other subscriber] and jokes from sickipedia
Me: Tell you what: because it’s you I’ll negotiate with your network: you’re on Orange, right? I’ve kidnapped the dog of the CEO of Orange; I’m pretty sure I can get
him to waive the charges in your case.
Them: Is vodaphone, and their ceo only has a parrot and 5 fish.
Me: =op
Them: Im confused, if its 15p per message why is it £2 a week?
Me: NO MORE THAN £2 a week (well, £1 per week per list). So 4 Joke Of The Week messages would be 60p, 8 would be £1, 20 would be £1. Remember that it’s usually a
multipart message spanning 4/5 messages each week. Full terms and conditions apply.
Them: Lol, sounds confusing, being a poor student i’ll have to pass i think, though i’ll miss moaning at your messages ;-)
Me: Really? You’re actually going? And, even more unbelievably, you’re actually falling for this obvious April Fools’ gag?
Me: Gotcha ;-)
Them: Yup and yup lol :-P
Happy April Fools day!
Them: oh arse, i can’t as i don’t pay the phone bill. is it possible for you to put them online?
Me: April Fools’, dummy!
Lol, good one. Did you manage to snare anyone?
Them: Textin back.no joke
Me: Gotcha! April Fools’.
It’s been a bit of a day for nostalgia. It started even before I woke up, when I was dreaming about an argument that could have marked the end of Claire and I’s relationship, if it weren’t for the fact that it didn’t even slighly
represent the actual circumstances of our seperation (I’ll spare you all the details). I was woken by a phone call from a company with whom I used to deal. Later, I caught up
with an old friend via instant messanger, in what was probably my only delibrate act of nostalgia of the day. Finally, while working this evening on a techy project that’s been part of
my life for about the last eight years, the random number generator in my MP3 playing software decided all of its own accord that what I’d really like to listen to is the same music
I was listening to when I first started on the project.
Did I not get the memo that this is National Nostalgia Day, or something? Is everything conspiring around me, or is this all a coincidence?
The thing I’ve learned about nostalgia is that it’s generally best left as it is: a collection of figments in your mind. Some are accurate, some mis-remembered, and all are seen through
glasses tinted with the colour of hindsight. And that’s great: that’s exactly how your brain is supposed to experience times past. If you’re an optimist, like me, it’s easy to pick out
your favourite memories and pretend that your life gone by was all as great as your happiest moments. If you’re a pessimist, well: you probably do the same thing, but compare those
great memories to how awful things are right now (and you’re wrong, but I can’t just tell you that and give you a more rational worldview, just as your cynicism won’t “fix” me, either).
That’s inevitable, of course: think back to the moment in your life at which you felt the most content that you ever have – at least that comes right to your mind. Unless your time on
the planet has been a continuous curve of improvement, with no ups-and-downs, then there’s something remarkable about that moment: it’s not right now. Well duh, of
course it isn’t. The most elementary mathematics would indicate that of all of the experiences in your life, there has to be some kind of regression toward the mean going on: what
you’re experiencing now should, on average, be representative of your life so far even before you factor in the Von Restoroff effect and other cognitive biases.
But I digress. My point was this: I would love to be able to finish what I’m working on and go play a game of Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle with folks like Bryn and Kit and Liz and Strokey Adam, just like I did over six and a half years ago. But
that’s not my life nowadays. And while I can get all doe-eyed about how awesome the Ship & Castle used to be before they gutted it and made it look like a trendy wine bar (apologies to
those of you for whom this is the news being broken of its demise), or I can pine for the days that those friends – now long-gone – used to all live a stone’s throw away from me, but
that’s not the full story. I don’t miss being even poorer than I am now, I don’t miss having to juggle my academic life with holding down a job, and a certainly don’t miss being quite
so arrogant as I was back then (for those of you who’ve only recently met me; think of me now, only more so).
Nostalgia is like alcohol: it’s great in moderation, but if you get too much of it, or you become dependent upon it, then you’re liable to get stuck and not be able to move on. And I
think that’s the message I should be taking away from this morning’s dream.
(and now, in a somewhat ironic and roundabout way, I’d better stop writing so I can go and play board games with the current Aber crew, as part of a tradition that
started with Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle, all those years ago…)
Right now, I’m out in Oxfordshire for this a “code week” – a get-together for the purpose of hacking some code together – for the Three Rings project. That’s got nothing to do with this post, but helps to offer a framing device by which I can explain why I was in such
proximity to London in the first place.
JTA at the Ops Room table
Last night, y’see, Ruth and I hopped on the bus down to London to meet up with Robin, her brother, for his
21st birthday. Starting out at The Dove in Broadway Market, we began an adventure of epic proportions, backed up by some
of the least-consistent planning ever encountered in a pub crawl. At times, the revellers and I were as one unit, moving together through the capital, shouting “Dave!” in unison. Other
times, keeping the group together and headed in the same direction was a little like trying to herd cats.
But progress was made, and a milestone birthday was celebrated. Highlights included:
Pub Jenga
Pub Monopoly is so last week: Pub Jenga is the new hotness. At each bar, we brought out a set of Jenga, the bricks of which had each been emblazoned – using a marker pen – with
the names of diferent areas of London. When the tower collapsed, the brick responsible dictated where we would go to next.
Pub Jenga – The Next Big Thing
The person responsible for the destruction of the tower was required to drink a penalty shot of Jägermeister and be the bearer of the Jenga set and The Trowel until the next pub. Oh yeah, The Trowel. Robin’s plan was that, at
the end of the night, the Jenga set would be buried forever at a secret location. As we’d left before this point to catch the bus back to Oxford, I’ve no idea whether or not this
actually happened.
Another gripping turn of Pub Jenga
Mystery Pockets
Ruth and Robin’s older brother, Owen, had come prepared: having numbered each of his eight pockets and placed a mystery item in each, Robin was periodically charged with picking a
number, at which point the contents of the pocket were revealed and used. Some of the items revealed were:
Face Paints
One of the first Mystery Pockets contained red and green face paints, with inevitable results. Also, I’m not sure what was in them, but quite a lot of people at the table started
itching quite a lot after they were applied: whoops! Click the thumbnails for bigger pictures.
Party Poppers
After these were chosen, everybody managed to get ahead of Robin by sprinting down a tube station fire escape staircase, and hiding around the corner at the bottom. Which might have
been more effective if not for the fact that it’s quite hard to hide a dozen people in a tight stairwell. Also, that Robin had decided by this point to “fall” down the staircase.
Silly String!
Silly string! It’s so silly!
It’s silly. ‘Nuff said.
People Of London
Our travels put us into contact with a variety of people from around the city, like:
The Moon Man
In Covent Garden, we got a small audience as a result of our various exploits, but this one – persuading a random stranger to bare his colourful underwear to the world, might be the
best. In the background, you can just make out an unrelated group of partygoers, about to tie themselves together with a long rope left lying around by a street performer.
The Moon Man pulls his trousers down
Owen’s Fans
The two women at the next table from us in a bar in Oxford Circus, who seemed quite pleased and impressed when Owen tore his shirt in half in a show of manliness. I’m pretty sure that
if he’d have asked, they’d have paid to see more.
Jamaican Me Crazy
A busker with drums who we persuaded to play the most reggae interpretation of Happy Birthday To You that has ever been heard.
Lay down some beats! Dancing might have been involved on my part.
Dave!!!
I can’t even remember how, but it quickly became our callsign that – in order to make sure that everybody was together (at least, after we’d lost the enormous Papa-Smurf-penis-styled
balloon, fresh from Owen’s mystery pockets, that had previouly been our beacon), we’d all shout “Dave!!!”, as if we’d lost somebody by that name. No, I can’t explain it either.
But… where’s Dave? DAVE? DAVE!!!
A Cornish-Pasty Themed Pub
Seriously, such a thing exists. We almost gave this one a missing, mistaking it for merely being a late-night Cornish Pasty Shop (yes, that was more believable to us at this point),
before we noticed that it had a bouncer. “What kind of bakery needs security?” “Ohhhhh.”
I’m still amazed that we didn’t attract a larger audience than we did, playing Jenga in this famous spot for street entertainers.
Racing Around The Transport Network
You know all of those signs about not playing on the escalators, not running up the escalators: all that jazz. Apparently some of the group didn’t think that they applied to them, with
hilarious consequences. Honestly, I’ve never seen somebody slide all the way down the central reservation of a 100-foot escaltor before, “bouncing” over every sign and
emergency-stop-button as they rocketed down along the polished steel. And if I never do again, that’ll be fine, because I’ve seen it now.
Meeting Some Fabulous People
Turns out, everybody who came along to Robin’s birthday – most of whom I hadn’t previously met – were all awesome in their own unique ways. It’s been a long time since I’ve hung out in
the company of such a lively crowd. Thanks to you all for a fantastic night out.
Much thanks to Welsh Water, where a friendly man talked me through the quirks in my stop tap (who’d have thought that it would be so hard to turn
a tap off and drain a system). Now I suppose I ought to start mopping. Then I suppose I ought to find out what’s burst, and why.
Alongside all of this, I need to work out how to stop my washing machine from being so confused and let me have my bedsheets back. I don’t think the engineers that programmed it ever
thought of the possibility that the water supply might be interrupted mid-cycle.
