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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
Today's topic was requested by dwmalone, and my 10 minutes starts... now.
The 1980s was the heyday of the coin-operated arcade game. Sure, they'd started to emerge during the 1970s, but two bats and a square ball that went "boop" could only be taken so far. In the 1980s games became better and, well, more playable, to be honest, and ruthless competition between manufacturers led to the best 1980s arcade games being just about the most fun you can have by grasping a joystick and pushing all the right buttons, as it were.
The classic years were the early 1980s. Pac Man, which apparently wasn't actually inspired by a pizza with a slice taken out, was a social phenomenon despite having what today would be considered very simple gameplay - just up, down, left, right, eat the dots and avoid the ghosts. Other games such as Defender (shoot everything that moves, and don't let the unfortunate humanoids plummet to earth and splat or be converted into those annoying bleepy mutants) had their afficionados, while other connosieurs of the period will talk about the vector graphic classics such as Asteroids (shoot everything that moves, especially the fast-moving tiny UFO that went bweeweeweewee), Star Wars (shoot everything) and Tempest (uh... what was that about, anyway?) as being the foremost games of the period.
Pac Man, of course, went on to a long and illustrious career. Donkey Kong (which Wikipedia will tell you does not contain any actual donkeys) launched the career of a plumber named Mario. But other characters from 80s video games are not so famous today. What happened, for instance, to the little man from Berserk? Did Blue Wizard go any further in his career after Gauntlet, or does he still need food badly? I guess we'll never know. What actually happened to launch the war that Missile Command put you in charge of? History does not tell.
As the 80s wore on, video games started becoming a bit more like pinball, in that what people needed to get them playing were gimmicks. People were now used to zapping aliens, and what they wanted was... well, to zap more aliens, but higher-resolution aliens. They wanted the aliens to explode in stereo. This culminated in games like Space Harrier, a ride-on game which tipped up and down with stereo sound and all kinds of exciting things, not least a semi-comprehensible sampled voice that was maybe slightly more understandable than the famous BBC Micro speech box which sampled newsreader Kenneth Kendall.
So people zapped and blasted their way through the 80s. Billions of space invaders got zapped, untold gazillions of dots were, well, eaten by Pac-Man, Defender players generally failed to defend, but then towards the end of the decade came the first major threat to arcade games - home games consoles such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. These let people play at home without the hassle of substandard ports to home computers or loading from tape. So the arcade game slowly started to die off, and the next big revolution was launched in gaming - home gaming and the console revolution went on to change the world.
Time up - 10 minutes precisely.
Another year, a completely shameful lack of updates here. I guess this is probably a hint as to how hectic this year has been for me - I simply haven't had time to stop and think until, well, the end of the year. It's been a real whirlwind of a year. Since January I've stopped being self-employed (I wasn't very good at it, frankly), started at Google, spent quite a lot of time away from home, got married, gone on honeymoon, and rounded things off by buying a house. That's the short version. I've also visited Greece, been to other peoples' weddings in Wisconsin and Seattle, been rubbish at running but am having lots of fun cycling, and well, the list goes on.
Unfortunately, this insane busyness, combined with the desire when I actually have spare time to just spend it sleeping and attempting to do as little as possible, means that I'm a little tubbier than I was a year ago, something which I'll have to start working hard to remedy pretty soon. If I haven't got myself back into at least a little bit of shape and run at least one competitive (for me) 10k by the end of March, kick me.
As a result of this I haven't seen nearly as much of many people as I'd wanted to. This blog's also suffered, mostly because I've had lots of interesting things which I've wanted to write about but never got around to that either - by the time you finally get to sit down in front of a blank screen whatever inspiration had struck had gone. This is, as you can guess, somewhat frustrating, so I've decided that I'm going to take uffish.net in a new, er, direction as an experiment to see what happens. Details will follow in my next post.
Happy 2007!
Like just about everyone else in the civilised world, my life's progress has been marked by the acquisition of pieces of paper. Some of these pieces of paper are the sort which are given out very casually but which are almost impossible to get rid of without fears that your identity will be borrowed by someone who then uses your Mastercard to get 50 toilets shipped to Lagos before opening a bank account in your name and using it to launder a couple of million quid from their business supplying class A drugs wholesale.
What this means is that I've been accumulating bank statements, utility bills (in Britain, a gas bill is for some reason considered better ID than a photocard driving licence by many places), charge slips, all those irritating bits of paper which are pointless after a few months of existence but which are almost impossible to get rid of with confidence. When I finally decided that I really didn't need to keep bank statements dating back to 1998 anyway (fascinating reading though they sometimes make) I gave up and bought a shredder.
And wow, after the best part of a day spent shredding old bank statements and cellphone bills and whatever and blatantly disregarding the rated capacity of the shredder (a home model rated for 8 pages per cycle and about 10 cycles per day) I have a couple of bin liners of baggage shredded and ready to be chucked out. Freedom at last! It'll be weird to be moving house in a month or two without having to schlep along boxes of pointless old documents that I was only holding onto because, well, it was easier to do that than it was to get rid of them.
I guess the next thing is to do a ruthless cull of my book collection, but that'll be a little harder.
I've been meaning to put something new here for ages, but as a new job has been keeping me insanely busy for the last whatever I just haven't had a chance to write anything considered. Add to that the fact that I'm having problems thinking of things people might actually want to read about, and it all adds up to one embarrassing shortage of articles. What should I write about, eh? Answers on a postcard, please. Really. I have some ideas, but I'd rather see if I can answer requests.
If you really want to know what I've been up to, you could do worse than keep an eye on my Flickr photostream - over the last few weeks I've had a return trip to Death Valley, a brief visit to LA, a wander around Seattle and a trip to the very excellent Museum of Flight at Boeing Field.
While it's well-known that in the US (virtually) all numbers beginning with 555 are fictional, I didn't know before that there are a whole bundle of Ofcom-approved fictitious number ranges in the UK as well.
If you need to get hold of me, I'm on 020 7946 0153. My mobile's 07700 900853.
I grew up in the 1980s, the decade of the yuppie. Mention the 1980s to a random sample of people today and a significant number will mention two things - mobile phones and Filofaxes, the two iconic objects which no self-respecting red-braces-wearing yuppie would have been seen without. I even have to admit that I had a Filofax myself for a while in my late teens - the cheapest one available from WH Smith, with a plastic cover that soon started to peel away to reveal the cardboard underneath. But it was useful for keeping addresses and notes in.
Time moved on, and in the early 1990s the hunk of paper was superseded in both the yuppies' and my eyes by the developing market for Personal Digital Assistants. The PDA was a revelation, models like the Psion 3 and, later, the Psion 5 providing nifty handheld computing power and storage for addresses and appointments. The Psions even had a built-in programming language so you could code for them without needing an external development platform. I had one, and a lot of people I knew had them as well. Most of these were upgraded in time with the stylus-based Palm machines that swept all before them towards the end of the decade, and today Windows-based and Palm-based PDAs rule the universe, with the more recent additions of the Blackberry and the Treo combining cellphones and PDAs to make what should be the ultimate life-management tool. All the information you need stashed away in a nifty slab of electronics you can fit in your pocket, which synchronises with your desk machine to keep everything up to date. Perfect!
But here's the problem - the PDA isn't perfect. In many cases they're hardly usable, mostly because the much-vaunted synchronisation between PDAs and the desk just doesn't happen. Software is flaky, Bluetooth often just, well, just plain doesn't work if you look at it the wrong way, and the upshot of this, in my experience, is that unless you have a very, very simple setup with one piece of software managing your contacts and such on your desktop with one PDA syncing to it then you might as well not bother as the whole setup will be flaky and unreliable at best.
I've gone through so many PDAs over the years - the Psions, my Palm V, and sundry later Palms and Clies leading finally to my Treo 650 - always thinking that maybe this latest gadget would be the one to iron out the bugs and actually become the life-organisation tool that their proponents claimed it would be. But it's never happened - every one's just ended up being a fun and expensive toy.
It doesn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be rocket science to come up with open and robust protocols for exchanging things like appointment data and address books among computers and PDAs (after all, a PDA's just another computer). There are already standards such as Vcard (for address data) and iCalendar (a widely supported standard for appointment data) but nothing to glue it together. As far as I know, the interfaces and USB protocols for connecting PDAs to host machines aren't standardised either, so everything's reliant on either proprietary vendor-specific software or reverse-engineered third party implementations. I might be wrong and there are actually are standards for these things - in which case, well, it's maybe time to improve the quality of the implementations, eh? The whole area today is basically a dog's breakfast, and doesn't show much sign of getting any better in the immediate future.
So now things are going full circle. A growing number of people are losing patience with trying to get their whizzbang PDAs to do what they promised to do and going back to paper. A co-worker told me a while ago that she'd had a PDA for a while, but it eventually just turned into an expensive thing for sticking Post-it notes to so she gave in and went back to her Filofax. I laughed at the time.
You can guess what happened next. A couple of weeks back I went out and bought a Filofax. The one I bought wasn't the cheapest available at £35, but that's still a lot cheaper than the cheapest PDA and a lot more functional. If I want to make notes, I can just scribble on the notepad in the back and insert the page somewhere convenient (as it were). I can maintain a To-do list and tick things off when they're done, and see my appointments for the next few weeks at a glance. If I want to annotate something I can write in the margin, or stick a Post-it note to the page or use a Jot Pad sheet (they cost a lot less here than in the US, mercifully - £1.75 for 3) and slip it onto the rings.
I can look up streets in London or the Tube map, or find someone's address, and it'll never run out of battery power. If I don't have it with me I can make notes on an index card or whatever else comes to hand and keep them reasonably organised as well, as my Filofax has a little pocket to keep things like that in (or you can just poke holes in them and put'em on the filing rings). It's flexible, intuitive and expandable. There are even cheaper options out there as well, of course, but I'm not nearly Web 2.0 enough to carry a Hipster PDA.
The only thing I can't use it for is checking my email on the train, looking up train times or playing Solitaire, for which I'll be keeping the Treo around at least for the time being until I lose patience with its habit of rebooting itself or turning the phone bit off for no reason and replace it with a smaller, lighter cellphone with better battery life.
On the last day of the tax year (the 5th April) I'm going to be shutting up shop on my career as a self-employed computer geek. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I found it hard to not spent my every spare moment worrying about money and income (the primary obsession of the average contractor), which kind of sucks when you're trying to get on with the rest of life. Secondly, the end of the tax year's a good opportunity for doing so as it means everything's nice and tidy for going back into the fully-employed PAYE universe, so now is as good a time as any to return to full-time work. Thirdly, we're planning on buying a house early next year, and it's very much easier to persuade people to lend you money if you're in full-time employment. Finally, while I've been lucky to have enough work to pay the bills and then some the kind of short-term consulting work I was hoping to pick up hasn't materialised.
Once I decided to go back to being full-time, I was extremely lucky as I've been able to take my time and look around for work which interests me rather than just taking the first job I could find out of necessity. The result of this is that from late April I'm going to be working at Google's newly-expanded London office, which is building a systems admin group. This makes me happy, partially because it's going to be nice to have a stable workplace again but also because there's a lot of interesting stuff happening there which I'm looking forward to being part of. It's likely that I'll be spending quite a bit of time in Dublin initially, and I'm also looking forward to revisiting some of my old stamping grounds. Of course, some things have changed - now I want to go and run around Howth Head on a warm spring evening rather than just walking around it.
I'm feeling fairly upbeat as a result of all this. The notion of having spare time which I feel is actually my own rather than the business's is extremely liberating, and I've got all sorts of plans on the go as a result. One of the main things in my mind is my long-dormant Geek Aid project, which deserves some attention. It seems that all of a sudden I've stopped spending all my time thinking about just making enough money to live and have gone back to wanting to change the world, a laughably naive and childish notion which life still hasn't quite managed to stamp out of me permanently, although that's fine by me.
Finally, I now have a couple of weeks of rest before starting at Google and a strong desire to not just spend it playing games. I shall have to think of a project to keep me occupied.
So, things are all pretty upbeat at the moment. I feel as if my life just took a major turn for the better, and it's time to get on with living it.
A couple of days ago I was discussing the idea of doing "braindump" posts here on various subjects, as I know far too much about various areas of trivia. Coincidentally, I was mailed earlier today by someone asking for any thoughts I had on being best man at a wedding. So, this is the first of these braindumps. If you've got ideas for any more, do drop me a line..
I personally think that 99% of the books about being a best man are bunk and should be thrown away. Virtually all of it's common sense. What I discuss below is the traditional "standard" stuff, which may get varied wildly. For instance, it's not at all unusual for the entire party to enter the church/venue/whatever together nowadays. Protocol and etiquette are something which some people will want to stick to rigidly, and others will want to vary. The only bits which are non-negotiable are the ceremonial legal parts where certain things have to be said in a certain order to make the marriage legal, and the signing of the register. Other than that, you may find that things vary a lot from the standard. This is, IMO, a good thing - life would be terribly boring if all weddings were identical. You'll probably gather from the below, though, that I'm something of a traditionalist.
Essentially, the best man is (with the chief bridesmaid) the head of operations at a wedding. It's a dual role. Firstly, you're there to keep an eye on the groom before and during the service and to help out with various bits of planning, carry the rings, then give a speech and maybe MC at the reception. Secondly, there's the much broader role of being a general fixer. This part of the job is to do whatever you can to make sure that the day goes smoothly - help deal with any unexpected events, take minor tasks off the hands of the groom and/or bride (and find someone to do it if you can't do it yourself). The second part, IMO, is even more important than the first part - it's an extremely special day, and keeping trouble out of the way of the couple themselves is a great way to make sure they have the day they were hoping for.
Check exactly what's expected of you. While the best man's role has been fairly clearly set out over the last couple of centuries, what people list as "the best man's duties" isn't and shouldn't be a hard and fast list. Find out who else is involved in the male side of the wedding party - groom, ushers, maybe the fathers of the couple, and so on. The chief bridesmaid (or maid/matron of honour, depending on how they're doing it) is your main ally on the other side, so it's worth getting in touch with them as well to compare notes. Don't obsess too much - the prospectively happy couple and their families will generally be quite happy arranging things themselves, but the groom may ask you to help with things like arranging suit hire. Don't worry too much about what you'll be wearing - in general, everybody looks good in a morning suit if it fits properly. (And not to put to fine a point on it, I look VERY good.)
Stag nights as they were are more or less a thing of the past, thank God. As often as not today the bride and groom will host a party themselves or have some kind of joint gathering. You can help organise it, though, and if the groom does want to have a proper boy's stag night then think of what the groom would want to do, rather than what you and your mates might want to do to the groom. It's not really fair for the groom to spend their entire stag night worrying about what you might be going to do to them, and if they're not likely to take being wrapped in gaffer tape and posted naked to Edinburgh with good humour, it's probably better to forget it and just let them enjoy themselves. Remember that because the wedding itself is very much the bride's day, the stag night is the only bit really remaining which is just for the groom.
There'll probably be a rehearsal if it's going to be a church or other non-civil wedding (registry offices don't generally do the rehearsal thing). It's worth your while to be there, not least because if you haven't met people like the parents and the bridesmaids it's a good time to do so. Also, if you're lucky you'll get bought dinner afterwards.
Shortly before the wedding happens, check what's going to happen with the rings. This is quite important - in some cases they'll happily hand over the rings a week or so in advance, in others a concerned parent might insist on keeping tight hold of the rings more or less until the ceremony begins. Somewhere between these extremes is normal, but do make sure that you have them in good time or that you at least know their location and who's got them. You really, really don't want to find yourself having an "Oh, I thought YOU had them..." conversation five minutes before the ceremony. You may feel like a dork checking constantly that you still have them, but that's considered more or less normal so don't worry about it. If you've got a waistcoat with a little pocket for rings, take them out of the box and keep them in there. If not, I'd keep the rings in your pocket in their box until they're needed.
Also check to see if you're also going to be a witness and sign the register. It's fairly normal for the best man and chief bridesmaid to be the witnesses, but many couples do it differently for whatever reason. Check first anyway, just to avoid any confusion on the day.
Get up early on the day and leave plenty of time for general faffing around. If you're not staying in the same place as the groom, make sure he's got up too. It's helpful to make yourself available throughout the day for any minor tasks that need performing, such as nipping out to sort out hotel room keys and things for afterwards. Make sure you both get to the wedding venue with plenty of time to spare - you can always nip out for a cup of tea or whatever if you'd have to wait hours otherwise. The bride and bridesmaids will be doing all the generic girly stuff for, probably, most of the morning. I suggest keeping out of the way...
Traditionally, the last guest to enter is the bride's mother, who is escorted in by the head usher and sits at the aisle end of the front left row. The ushers usually discreetly save themselves seats near the back at the end of a row in order to be able to take care of any issues that arise. The arrival of the bride's mother generally means it's almost showtime. The groom will be looking around nervously anyway, because that's what they do. Keep an eye on the ushers, who'll generally give you the "go!" signal. If you're not standing up, now is the time to do so. Cue the music, cue the bride, and here we go.
Relax. The wedding itself is the easy part, as most celebrants will gently prompt you, and the best man's role consists more or less entirely of simply standing there during the actual ceremonial bit. In general, you'll be standing to the right of and very slightly behind the groom during the processional (the "here comes the bride, thirty feet wide" bit) and during the ceremony itself. During the talky bit inbetween you'll usually get to sit down while the bride and groom stay out front and centre for maximum embarrassment.
You'll be asked for the rings by the celebrant when they're needed. If they're in a box, take them out first, then place them on the Book of Common Prayer / Bible / cushion or whatever is proffered - don't hand them over directly. That's all you have to do. When the ceremony is finished, there's a little musical talk-amongst-yourselves interlude for the signing of the register. If you're signing the register, you'll be shown what to do - I can't remember whether it's two copies in the UK or three, but it's self-explanatory. Then it's back to the front for some closing remarks and time for the recessional, aka the happy-couple-walking-out bit. Just turn around and leave in the order which is sensible - the best man usually follows behind the bride and groom, with the chief bridesmaid/maid of honour. Don't forget to smile, as lots of people will take your photo as you go...
That's the wedding bit over and done with. There'll now be a generous amount of milling around outside while people congratulate the happy couple. At this point, you, the ushers and the bridesmaids transmogrify into your roles for the rest of the day - logistics specialists. There'll probably be a certain amount of formal photography, although photographers these days take, mercifully, less time than they used to. Help them get on with it by marshalling people as necessary. In particular, there'll usually be an "everyone" photo taken after all the bizarre combinations of people, so be prepared to marshal the crowds.
Time for the reception. Be sure in advance that you know where it is and how people are supposed to get there, as a few people will probably ask you for advice having not read the invitation properly.
Make sure you know if there's any setting-up which needs to be done for the reception, and if there is find out who's doing it. You'll generally find yourself working as a team with the bridesmaids during the reception to sort out anything that needs taking care of, preferably before it annoys the bride and groom (or worse, the bride's mother). Make sure you know the answer to questions like "Where do presents go?".
The very formal way of doing things is that there is a receiving line at the entrance, usually the couple and parents, who get congratulated more and told things like "You must be very proud!" a lot. Once everyone's in and has found their seats and generally milled around a bit, they sit down and then stand up again for the entrance of the bridal party. Often this is announced by the best man (you may get given a gavel for the purpose. Do not use it to brain irritating relatives of the happy couple.), but just as often it's not.
Maybe there'll be a top table, maybe there won't, but everyone should be on the seating plan. Top table seating arrangements are fairly standard, but can get fraught in the event of there being multiple sets of parents for whatever reason (divorce/remarriage/etc). Fortunately, you have nothing to do with such politics, and in general the best man sits on the left hand side of the table (when looking out across the table), on the left hand of the groom's mother. The usual top table ordering is, basically, boy-girl-boy-girl like in school science lessons, although the bridesmaids are generally sat in a row on the right.
Eat the food, and then sometime between pudding and coffee (after the speakers have all finished their pudding, basically) it's speech time. Traditionally the best man acts as MC, but this is another of those areas where everything's flexible. The standard order of speeches is:
My personal view of best mans' speeches is that their most important function is to entertain. The only duty you really have to incorporate into it is reading any telegrams (okay - faxes, emails and cards..) that need to be read from people who can't make it. It's okay - nay, compulsory - to impugn the groom's character, but be aware of the fine line between gentle mockery and gratuitous revelation of things which people possibly didn't actually want to know about, If You Know What I Mean. Be aware of the boundary between poking fun and causing offence to parents or, er, the older people present. Be careful talking about the groom's past love life, and think about whether it's appropriate to mention it or whether it will just make people look embarrassed. In-jokes don't work unless a majority of those present will know what you're talking about - you want to avoid stony silences wherever possible.
A list of one-liners doesn't work either - it makes for a disjointed series of gags like a Bernard Manning routine rather than an enjoyable speech, and most people will just start to cringe after the tenth joke from the Big Book Of Best Man's Speeches.
Keep things moving along, don't tell any lengthy or rambling stories as people get bored, and it'll be fine. The last thing to remember is that although if you want to make a couple of personal remarks nobody will complain, you're supposed to be talking about the happy couple, not about yourself, so keep them to a minimum.
Planning the speech is completely down to personal taste. I've done it twice - the first time I spent a long time trying to write a script, but rereading it on the morning of the wedding decided it was rubbish, threw it away and spent the train journey to the venue scribbling some rough notes. The result worked much better than the scripted version, so the second time I did it I just made a few rough notes on index cards and extemporised around them.
Don't be too afraid of gimmicks, but IMHO best mans' speeches with accompanying Powerpoint presentations are a joke that's had its day, not to mention that audiovisual aids have a habit of breaking down. I wouldn't use props myself - if you do think about using them, be aware that the wedding day is extremely busy and you can't be certain that they'll necessary all be in the right place at the right time. Oh, yeah, and virtually all of the examples of best man's speeches out there on the net and in books are cringeworthily ghastly. Avoid them, or at most use them as a useful reference on what not to do.
There's not actually any traditional toast for the best man to make, but I figure it doesn't hurt to round things off with a final toast to "the happy couple", "the bride and groom" or whatever - keeping it informal and toasting them by name is probably even better. This gives you a chance to bow out gracefully without having to worry too much about how you're going to wrap up.
Other people may make speeches too, which is a good thing. It helps to know about it in advance, though, to get the order right.
Once that's over, your job is more or less done. Keep an eye on things, help people out if there are any problems, and make sure that there's a knife to cut the cake with, but apart from that the rest of the evening's your own. Enjoy.
Oh yeah. As Steve Jobs says, there's Just One More Thing...
Many couples have a first dance which comes shortly after the end of the meal and the speeches. Tradition will probably dictate that You Are Expected To Join In. That's just the way it is, I'm afraid. The problem is that many people see the best man (who generally dances with the chief bridesmaid) joining in as the signal that they can join in too. It's probably best to find out what's going to happen - whether they want the entire dance to themselves and you should join in on the second (unlikely, as most couples spend the first dance going "ohgodohgodohgodsomeoneelsepleasejoininandsaveusohgod") or whether you should just sashay onto the floor and strut your funky stuff about a minute after they've started. Saturday Night Fever impressions are generally strongly discouraged, unless it's a disco-themed wedding (in which case you're probably in Las Vegas and subject to American marriage etiquette which is similiar yet completely different to everything I said above).
I think that's about it.
I had a card a few days ago from... a well-known UK courier company, telling me that they'd tried to deliver a package but I was out. It also informed me that they would attempt delivery again sometime, although with no indication of when this might be. Additionally, they would hold onto the package before five days before returning it to sender. Okeydoke, I thought - I'll ring them and ask them to deliver the package on the next day I'm planning on being at home.
I rang the number on the back of the card. No answer - it just rang out. Okay, try the web. Took a bit of time to find the online tracking stuff, but sure enough it shows a delivery attempt. Unfortunately, no other way to ask for a redelivery or anything else.
A day or so later I check the web again and find that another delivery attempt's been made, on a day I was out. I phone again, and finally get through to someone after about 20 rings. No problem, they say - we'll hold onto the package for you if you'd prefer to collect it. Another day or two later I head over to their depot in the depths of Croydon (what is it about courier companies and Croydon?) and pick it up.
At this point it becomes extremely clear why I'd been having trouble getting hold of anyone to make any further arrangements. The place is busy. People are constantly in and out of the office, a couple of others are at desks wading through piles of paperwork, answering phones. Everyone is working hard. But the phones are still constantly ringing, simply because the way it looks to me is that if everybody always stopped to answer a ringing phone nobody would ever get to do anything else and the depot would grind to a halt. The office is overworked and understaffed, particularly given the fact that it's the height of the Christmas rush. To add insult to injury, the IT systems are suffering too. When the chap who deals with my package types the tracking number into his computer, by my mental stopwatch it takes over 10 seconds for the system to return the results. Add up all those 10 seconds over the course of the day, and you've got problems.
Fortunately, the management are clearly taking steps to address this problem. There are fresh signs all over the office, laser-printed and taped to the wall, declaring that "ALL CALLS MUST BE ANSWERED WITHIN 3 RINGS". How?, I find myself asking. By whom, exactly? Given the scene I've already described, it would be about as realistic for the management to put up signs declaring that all employees must grow an extra arm or paint the London Eye pink.
What do those signs accomplish? It would be a good thing to set a target of answering calls within three rings and forming a plan of action to find out what's needed to accomplish this (I ain't no business guru, but "more people" might be a start). It's not a good thing to put up signs making proclamations which are completely unachievable given your current circumstances. All they say to your workers is that "You're not working hard enough. Customers are complaining that they can't get through to us on the phone, and it's your fault".
Sometimes I wonder how all these vastly expensive business gurus who make huge amounts of money stating the obvious get away with it. When I see things like I saw earlier today, it all suddenly becomes clear.
I was going to write something here about how even with a multi-million dollar turnover and manufacturing being done in factories in the Far East rather than a small workshop in Melbourne, Crumpler (warning - hideous noisy Flash site) are still marketing themselves in an obscurely annoying way. However, I seem to have put most of my thoughts into this eBay auction instead. (Not that I'm trying to cynically drum up bids or anything, mind.)
(Later note - Okay, so eBay have pulled the auction, which was for my old Crumpler laptop bag. The reasons are obscure, but apparently it violated their policy as, shock horror, it included an external link to a newspaper article about Crumpler. Given that eBay UK is crawling with scams (Get your free Mac mini!) and vendors who just plain misrepresent themselves (listing says they're in the UK.. but oh, they're in Hong Kong!) or their goods, picking on lil' old me on such a technicality seems to be rather mean. Ah well.)
During a discussion on the WELL about spam filtering, after one exchange derailed the conversation in a rather astonishing manner it became apparent to me that the excellent and venerable Godwin's Law (which states that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1) has acquired a small extension. This extension (which I claim as my own, to be known as Knell's Corollary) stems from the current political climate, and can be stated thus:
For the purposes of the Law, references to the activities of the Bush Administration, or to Guantanamo Bay, may be substituted for references to Nazis or Hitler.
In fact, I would assert that in many forums, the requirements of Godwin's Law are currently being satisfied by Bush and/or Guantanamo comparisons more often than they are with Nazi comparisions.
I guess I should mention here that I am (for reasons which are complicated to go into, but are summarised as "I wanted one for myself, but you have to order hundreds of them") now selling rubber 'awareness' wristbands with "CTHULHU FHTAGN" moulded into them. This is so people can show their awareness of... well, I guess that if this means anything to you you'll get the joke, but if you don't then there's a little explanation on the page.
I'm only taking pre-orders at the moment, on the understanding that the wristbands themselves are currently being made in China and won't be with me for a couple of weeks. Since people have been asking me about them, though, I've made the page available a bit early. The photo on the page is all I've seen so far of the finished product (it was sent by the manufacturer for approval), but they look pretty nice to me.
Tell your friends! Ia!
I thought I'd see how some of my older stuff would sound if it was recorded rather than written down this afternoon, so had a play with a couple of my travelogues and a microphone (actually, the iSight on my Mac, which isn't actually bad quality-wise). The results were these MP3 files:
My mumbling voice is rather un-radiogenic due to the dodgy way I pronounce my sibilants, but hey, I enjoyed doing them.
My original plan for the End-to-End walk later this year was to shoot video en route and post small clips and stills to the web. After my long walk last Sunday, I looked at the photos I'd taken with my stills-capable camcorder. They were okay, but the drawbacks of the video-oriented optics were apparent in a fair amount of visible colour fringing and other minor ickiness. This is understandable if you're just snapping the odd still along with some video, but when I also realised that I never shot any video at all last Sunday I decided to rethink my strategy.
There are other factors as well - video heads and tape, for instance, don't necessarily stand up well to the kind of damp environment they'd be exposed to along the way. At the end of it all, you have a pile of videotapes which need to be edited up into something usable. And ultimately, landscapes aren't really very videogenic anyway.
So I decided to sell the camcorder on eBay (it should reach close to its original price - it's a new model and almost unused) and buy a nice stills camera instead. To be precise, I bought a Nikon D70 digital SLR with an 18-70mm (that's more like 28-105 in 35mm speak) AF Nikkor lens. It arrived today (handily, as today's my birthday!) and it really is a lovely piece of kit - and the deal's made all the sweeter by the fact that Nikon UK are offering a £100 rebate on that particular outfit at the moment. Combined with the sale of the camcorder, it's more or less a no-cost upgrade - this is very nice, as I've been spending money on things like tents and sleeping bags over the last month or so and buying a new camera would have been something of an unjustifiable luxury otherwise. Interestingly, the price of the D70 has dropped over the last few months mostly due to the introduction of a slightly updated model (the D70s) and the somewhat more basic D50. With Nikon UK's cashback offer taken into account, a D70 plus 18-70mm can currently be had for less than the price of a D50 with the shorter 18-55mm zoom - a good deal all around. Amazon are even selling it with a free case thrown in.
I'm deliriously happy with it so far. The handling is utterly lovely (I learned to take photos using SLRs as a kid, so reflexes just feel right to me) and for the kind of low-light stuff I do (yes, I take photos of the London Underground. You have a problem with this?) it's a big improvement on my 8700. The larger CCD and more light-grabbing optics mean it's more sensitive in the dim subterranean conditions, which means less noise and less opportunity for camera shake. A reflex viewfinder, continuous AF and more or less instant response from the shutter release make a big difference when shooting moving objects, too. I may pick up a somewhat faster prime lens (the zoom is f3.5-4.5) for low-light work, such as the plain ol' Nikkor f1.8 50mm, but not yet.
There are things for which the 8700 will still be more suitable - it's smaller and lighter than the D70, for starters - but for everything else, after half a day of manic picture-taking I'm happy to proclaim that the D70 looks set to become a bona fide classic. The only downer at the moment is that I can't test it on a long walk yet, due to my having some nasty blisters from last Sunday's adventures which mean that I haven't been able to run or walk long distances since then. I'm hoping they'll clear up by August.
For starters, this is the 200th post on this site. Golly.
I've finally got moving again on planning for the End to End, after a few weeks in which I was too busy to sit down and devote too much time to it. I've now got a pile of 50 A4 sheets, each of which is a stage of the walk - they're based on the 1:50000 maps as printed from Tracklogs. The pile is pretty intimidating as each sheet represents at least 26 and at most 76 kilometres of walking. Still, I can't wait to get going and start working through the pile - and if the pile of 50 sheets of A4 is intimidating, heaven knows what the pile of 1:25000 maps will look like once I've acquired them all.
To add insult to injury, I've finally got around to creating a website for the project. geektrek.org is now up and running, which I guess means that the project has been officially launched. Link to it lots and make sure people give lots of money to the charities in gratitude for not having to do the walk themselves.
A rather cool development is that I've found that the Loch Ness Marathon is on more or less the exact day that I expect to arrive in Inverness, so naturally I had to enter it. Definitely no guarantee of a stonking PB, but it'll be a fun experience. My legs will have no end of endurance after walking about 1600km, but I don't expect them to have very much speed in them. As was pointed out to me earlier, though, I am unable to resist entering races if I'm in the vicinity of them. Besides, running in the countryside around Inverness should be pleasant.
After Copenhagen last weekend, once I've had a bit of a break I'll be concentrating for the next couple of months on endurance with a touch of speedwork - plenty of long runs, some nice hard hill runs and a good few long walks with a loaded rucksack in preparation for August. While I'm pretty fit already and the first couple of weeks of an End to End walk are pretty good endurance training in themselves, I figure that doing a spot of training in the months leading up to it will pay dividends in the first few weeks of the walk in the form of less sore feet. And if I'm really being sufficiently foolish to combine a walk like this with not one but two marathons, keeping myself in some sort of running shape is a very good idea.
One of the problems with deciding to embark on some lengthy project like, say, walking 2000km is that once you've finally decided to do it you want to start now. Of course, it's completely impractical to do so - life being what it is today you can't just walk out of your front door and leave everything behind to do something like this - but still, sometimes it's tempting.
Anyway, there's still lots of planning to be done, and I need to get myself into slightly better shape in order to experience as little pain as possible during the first few weeks as my legs adapt to the pounding. I guess I should keep telling myself this.
However, I do now have the route planned out at 1:50000 scale courtesy of the excellent Tracklogs digital mapping software, with which I've been able to divide the distance into 50 stages. Most of these stages are a day long, but there are a few long-distance ones such as the crossing of Exmoor and the northern Highlands which will either be enormously long days or broken into more than one day's walking.
Until I can do any of that, though, I need to survive another three months of seriously itchy feet.
It's getting more and more probable that this is going to happen, so here's a quick overview of what I intend to do later this year. There are still a couple of hurdles to clear in order to make it okay for me to be away from home for over two months, but I don't think they're insurmountable.
The short version is easy:
15 August (approx): Depart Land's End
15-25 October (approx): Arrive John O'Groats
Naturally, this needs a little fleshing out.
The route I have in mind is fairly fuzzy so far, and will remain so until it's actually plotted out and divided into useful stages. McCloy's book is proving a useful reference. His route seems to make a lot of sense, although given the shortage of coastal walking on the journey as a whole it's very tempting to take the South West Coast Path for the first stage rather than the inland route. This adds another 90 or so miles (145km), which would bring the walk up to about 1,240 miles (1995km) by my rough calculations. That's 62 days at an average of 20 miles (32km) per day, which as I've allowed 77 days should be more than possible with plenty of opportunities for rest days and spending time over the more interesting bits.
It's naturally going to be necessary to do things like eat and sleep en route (damn these irritating biological restrictions), and this, along with the weather and the fact that the days start getting a lot shorter in autumn, largely dictates the exact dates for doing this walk. The tourist industry in many places starts to close down from the beginning of October onwards, and by the end of October it can be hard to find accomodation in some places. If you do it too early, however, you're likely to run into the end of the midge season in the Highlands. The disadvantage of starting in the middle of August at Land's End is that it's the height of the Cornish tourist season, which means that at least for the first couple of weeks advance bookings will be necessary.
There are many options for accomodation. I'm planning on carrying a tent (hey, you can get one-person backpacking tents weighing under a kilo now) for those times when there's nothing more comfortable around, or just for when there are reasonably civilised campsites available. The rest of the time there are such things as B&Bs, inns and youth hostels. It would be possible to do the macho thing and camp all the way, but where it's possible it doesn't seem to make sense to deny myself the odd comfy bed.
Many people do things like this primarily as a fund-raising activity. While those aren't my reasons for wanting to do this (maybe I'll expand on those in a later post if people so desire) it seems to make sense to choose a couple of organisations which deserve a bit of support and encourage people to donate to them if they wish to express their relief that it's not them who's walking such an awfully long way. One organisation which I think deserves more public recognition and support is the London Air Ambulance, who I've observed not once but twice landing in the car park at Surbiton station. I'm also planning to support another organisation with a more global remit - Oxfam spring to mind. Nothing's finalised yet, but we'll see what happens.
Oh, and of course - I'm a computer geek and a gadget freak, so there has to be some kind of technological aspect to this. Howsabout GPS tracking, updates from the road and a video log?
Anyway - more when I know it. It's still not definite that this will happen, but it's getting more likely by the day. Incidentally, if it does come off I'll be primarily doing it as a solo exercise, but if anyone wished to join in for a day or two I certainly wouldn't be averse to a bit of company on occasion.
Part of my reason for becoming a freelance worker (that translates as "usually unemployed" in most cases) last year was that I wanted to have more time to do things which I wanted to do. Instead of having to squeeze all my important extracurricular activities into twenty-something days of annual leave (no scoffing, Americans - we all know you only get 2 days of leave a year) I wanted to be able to say things like "Right, I'm taking the next three months to do this" and actually be able to do that.
The only problem with this approach is that I've actually started to think of things I really want to do - things like a long ocean passage on Søren Larsen or a couple of long driving tours of the less-visited parts of the USA. The one which has resurfaced in my mind most recently, and which there's a chance I may actually take the plunge and do, is to walk Land's End to John O'Groats unsupported. It's "only" about 1150 miles by a fairly interesting route (direct and on roads it's just under 900, but that makes for hideous walking) and would probably be doable in 8-9 weeks at the kind of pace I walk. What makes it more appealing, of course, is the prospect of taking along lots of fiendish gadgetry like GPS units and palmtops and arranging things like live tracking, which would be kind of fun.
I did the provisional steps of planning this trip a couple of years ago and for whatever reason it didn't happen in the end, but now that I have the ability to block out the time - work permitting, naturally - and actually do it I'm getting more and more keen to do so. August-September, or maybe skewed a bit later to finish in mid-October to give a couple of weeks of recovery before the Dublin Marathon on 31 October, seems like it would be a good time. There's still things which would need to be sorted out and other plans to be made but I'd like to think that it could still happen this year or maybe, if that proves impossible to organise, next year.
I guess we'll see.
(permission granted to print out, photocopy, translate and distribute to arrivals at LHR..)
Dear Tourist (or other visitor),
Welcome to London! The city in which you've just arrived (and if you arrived through Heathrow, please accept our apologies) is home to nearly eight million people. Hundreds of thousands more commute into the city on a daily basis to work. Add the enormous numbers of visitors that we host all year round and the city's beginning to look like a pretty crowded place, and even those of us who live and work here all year round find the crowds and griminess pretty stressful sometimes.
We mostly manage to get on okay, although like anywhere else we've got our fair share of morons. Don't worry - we think that rude people who push and shove are morons too, so please don't think that's what all Londoners are like. The reason we all manage to get along without killing each other is that there are certain ways in which we assume people will behave. You might find it puzzling that someone will get angry at you for just riding on an escalator or being on the Underground, so I thought I'd write this brief guide to explain some of the behavioural oddities of Londoners. Hopefully this will help you to get around town like a native and save you from irritated looks or worse.
The most fundamental rule is spatial awareness. It's important to know what's going on around you, in London more than in many other cities. As there's a crowd just about everywhere you go in London and the pavements tend to be narrow, you need to be aware that there will be other people wanting to move around you. For instance, if you're walking down the street with a few friends and see something interesting or need to discuss where you're going next, don't forget that other people will probably be right behind you. If you need to have a conversation or want to take a photo of something, then don't block the pavement. Move to one side - the edge furthest from the road is usually the best bet - and you'll find that you won't get people being irritated at you for blocking their way. There's always something interesting to see on the streets of London, but don't forget that many of us walk these streets every day and just want to get somewhere. While you're on holiday you might well be thinking of London as one big theme park - and there's a lot more to do in the city than there is in even the biggest theme park - but don't forget that for most of the other people around you it's a home and a place of business. So just be aware that there are other people around you and you'll go a long way towards blending in like a native. Be considerate.
It's pretty likely that during your visit you'll go on the Underground. The Tube. It's the world's oldest underground railway system and one of the most extensive, but particularly on platforms and in passageways it can be quite cramped (and that's before you get on the train) due to the age of the system and the construction methods employed when digging in the London clay. So here are a few useful tips to prevent you receiving annoyed glances or getting pushed out of the way:
Please do visit our famous pubs. However, bear in mind that bars are about the only place where the British do not instinctively form a queue to be served. Instead, everyone just kind of automatically "knows" when it's their turn based on who was there first. Please respect this and don't try and barge in by waving banknotes or shouting. Don't try and form an orderly queue either, as people will just look at you strangely. If in any doubt, it's quite likely that the person who arrives after you will notice when it's your turn and point it out. You don't need to tip bar staff. For more details, see Kate Fox's excellent guide to pub etiquette and her also excellent book Watching The English.
Don't expect people to try too hard not to walk in front of you when you're taking a photo of your mates, especially if taking this photo involves blocking Hungerford Bridge. Sorry, but that's life. Just be patient and wait for a quiet moment. If everyone waited all the time for everyone taking a photo, we'd never get anywhere.
Do hail a black cab if you're lost or scared or a bit drunk or just plain confused. If the TAXI light on top is lit, they're available. Black cab drivers are probably the most competent taxi drivers in the world bar none, and they're also police screened and background checked before being licensed. The back of a black cab is one of the safest places you can be in London. Conversely, don't take illegal minicabs, especially at night. If a guy comes up to you and asks if you want a taxi, he's most likely touting for an illegal minicab firm. Say no. If you want to know why, refer to the Public Carriage Office website.
If you walk into someone and they say "Sorry", it doesn't mean they're admitting some form of liability. If someone walks into you, say "Sorry". You'll probably both say "Sorry" anyway. It may not seem logical, but this is just the way it's done here, okay? Apologise to each other and get on with your lives.
While it's true that we have some of the best free healthcare in the world, don't try to get a free sample through being run over while crossing the road. Unless you know the roads you're crossing particularly well, you're best off waiting for the green man. Even when you have a green light, beware of cycle couriers without lights who will generally cut across your path and shout obscenities at you if you complain. See "morons" as mentioned earlier.
Finally - I'm amazed at how many foreign visitors (and especially Americans) don't say "please" when asking for something, and "thank you" when receiving it. This is generally considered to be simple good manners in Britain, even when you're just ordering a coffee or buying a train ticket, and if you fail to do so you're running the risk of being considered rude, boorish and demanding. Speak softly and remember to use the magic word and people will like you a lot more for it.
I hope you find these tips useful and that they help to prevent any visit-spoiling unpleasantness. Once again, welcome and enjoy your stay!
Welcome to New England, where the states are small. And specifically, welcome to Rhode Island - which is the smallest state of all. It does have the longest official name in the Union to make up for it - it rejoices in the name of The State of Rhode Island And Providence Plantations - so I guess that size isn't entirely important. We're currently holed up in a small hotel in Newport, RI watching the rain lash down outside while cursing the town highways department for the razor-sharp kerbstones with which most of the local roads are blessed. While getting fantastically lost looking for the hotel I pulled over to dig out the directions, bumped the kerb fairly gently and then sat listening to the gentle hisssssss of escaping air as the nearside front tyre lost the will to live. It had been a pretty irritating day already and this was the last in a long list of stress points, so it was merciful that the Hertz roadside assistance people sorted things out in double-quick time and sent a tow-truck to get the wheel changed.
This was a genuine all-American tow truck, an enormous hulking lump bristling with lights which appeared in the rear-view mirror like the mothership from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. As all the driver needed was a jack and his nifty electric wheel wrench this probably counted as overkill, but the wheel was changed a lot quicker than if I'd done it myself with the piddly little jack and wrench provided with the car.
The car! I must mention the car. I'd reserved a standard-size car, which is often a Mustang or the like. This is good for me as I've driven them before but even better, the helpful Hertz person at Logan was in a good mood and quietly upgraded it to a convertible. A silver Mustang convertible! With New York plates! Okay, so it's the middle of winter in New England but at least we're prepared if there's a sudden spell of dry weather.
A brief inspection of the damaged tyre today made me decide it wasn't worth even attempting to get it repaired - it had a tear several inches long in the side wall which went right through the ply underneath - so a quick call to Hertz resulted in most of today being spent on a trip to TF Green Airport in Providence to exchange it for a new one. My good heavens, the replacement turned out to be a red Mustang convertible with, and I am not making this up, California plates. It wasn't the same one as I'd hired last year, but it was sure a long way from home and probably feeling a little damp due to the rain not having stopped all day.
On the way back we stopped at an Outback Steakhouse for some comedy lunch. This is a chain of, well, sort-of-Australian-themed diners with lots of fake Aussie junk on the walls and shovelfuls of "fair dinkum"-type stuff in the menu. I was particularly entertained by the card on the table inviting me to "Say g'day to a frosty cold one!" where the cold one referred to was not VB or Toohey's but Budweiser.
On the subject of America's favourite beer, I can't resist passing on a pointer to the latest offering from those master brewers at Anheuser-Busch, Bud Extra. Yes, you read right - it's beer with added ginseng, caffeine and guarana...
I managed to get out for a run today in my shiny new shoes. With the temperature around freezing and a biting cold wind adding to the fun, it was definitely bracing. And hilly. Just the thing to make a holiday complete.
Just about every open-air object in Boston was gently dripping this evening after the first real show of weather I've seen since getting here on New Year's Day. A heavy snowfall overnight lasted through most of the morning, when various other forms of precipitation (sleet, freezing rain, ice pellets) took over to add their own unique signatures and turn the streets into a mixture of fresh wet snow and mushy, freezing-cold slush.
It was obvious that this was the perfect day for a run. My feet were kind of itchy as I hadn't run in the open air since last Saturday and anyway, I had a shiny new pair of shoes to road test. So it was on with the thermals, out the front door, and off I went after a couple of minutes delay while my GPS worked out that Toto, it wasn't in London any more.
The pavements were tough going as the combination of ploughed roads and a slight thaw had filled the gutters with freezing cold slush, making crossing roads an awkward operation. The pavements themselves ranged from completely clear to snowy and slippery. Turning off the road onto the bike path made things a bit easier. The path was mostly covered in fresh virgin snow, making running somewhat easier but still fairly strenuous as you really have to pick your feet up and yomp. It's great fun running through fresh snow, though, and I enjoyed that bit.
It had naturally started to rain again as soon as I set off, so when I got back to the house after about the longest 5k I've ever run I looked like a drowned rat in Lycra thermals. My legs are still hurting from the effort.
At the other end of the scale, I tried running a few kilometres on a hotel gym treadmill on Monday. It was really quite fantastically dull to just run on the spot and not go anywhere, despite being able to watch CNN while I was at it. Treadmills are good for keeping tight control on things like speed and incline, but for distance running it had all the excitement of watching paint dry or, in this case, of watching a distance meter moving very slowly. Give me some nice fresh snow any day.
Well, it's nearly the end of 2004, which is kind of like the end of 2003 was - sort of cold and definitely dark most of the time. Christmas has been and more-or-less gone, the new year is imminent (I'll be spending New Year's Day running a 10k race and then getting on a plane, so will have to remain reasonably sober on New Year's Eve) and the days are starting to get longer. At least, the almanac in my GPS tells me the days are getting longer, but it's going to be some time before the effects of this are apparent.
So what happened in 2004? Well, I posted 170 entries here on subjects as oddly diverse and random as commuting, firewalls, spam, American culture, self-employment and, well, okay, yes, occasionally about trains and running. I got quoted in some unusual places, and served answers to search engine queries ranging from, according to the logs, "elvish grammar" to "maths in a box".
There are also (on the other side) seventy-something entries in Four Foot Eight, but these are slow in coming as daahling, the Muse won't perform just on demaaahnd, you know.
What else happened this year? Specifically, what happened which didn't involve sitting in front of a computer? Well, I went to America for the first time (and was pleasantly surprised), and I became self-employed (which has lasted at least a few months, but we'll see), and I moved yet again (I'm sure getting bored of doing that). I took up running a few months ago and, despite the various aches and pains, have been enjoying it far more than I should. I didn't, however, decide what I want to do when I grow up. I'm aiming to do that by the age of 50.
None of my assorted crackpot schemes appeared to inspire anyone's imagination much, so I'm still not a much-sought-after commentator who regularly has to turn down invitations to be on Have I Got News For You. This is a shame, as it's about time someone put that cocky Paul Merton guy in his place.
But enough talking about 2004 - what will 2005 bring? Well, no doubt there'll be more blethering here (as long as people keep at least pretending to read it) and more running once I finally get back into the swing of things post-injury. Apart from that -- well, we'll just have to see, won't we?
Since it's the time of year when everybody and their dog is jumping on the "... of the year" bandwagon, I guess there's no harm in my joining them. A few overenthusiastic people have already been making "... of the century!" proclamations, but as it's only 2004 I'm going to hold off on that one until I'm, oh, about 120.
The particular "of the year" I'd like to talk about is the "thing of the year" - in other words it's an excuse to talk about anything that's interesting, but I'm going to read that as "the thing which has taken the greatest strides towards technological ubiquity in the last year".
In that category, I give you the US Department of Defense NAVSTAR Global Positioning System, known to its friends as GPS.
GPS has been around for years. I saw my first GPS receiver many years ago, a hulking Garmin portable which ate batteries at a hell of a rate and produced a handy position readout in degrees, minutes and seconds that told you where you were within the restrictions imposed by the deliberately degraded signals which civilian users of GPS had to live with. This meant that accuracies of about +/-25 metres were about the norm, maybe a little better on a good day. At this time the civilian applications of GPS were generally limited to professional users who needed to know where they were on a regular basis, such as pilots and mariners.
The combination of two factors changed the face of GPS from the point of view of the civilian user. Firstly, the march of technology made it possible to develop smaller and cheaper GPS modules. Secondly, on May 1st 2000 President Clinton announced that the full accuracy of GPS was to be made available for civilian use by the removal of Selective Availability (SA). From then on, it was possible for anyone to find out where they were on the surface of the planet to within a very few metres just by consulting a little electronic gadget. Pause for a moment and consider what this means from a historical point of view. Pause also to consider whether this wider availability of accurate positioning signals would have happened if it had not been in place well before September 11 2001. When the data's graphed it's easy to see just how suddenly and dramatically the accuracy of civilian GPS changed overnight.
But happen it did, accompanied by a rider pointing out that the DoD reserved the right to re-impose SA if the need arose. It's now fairly unlikely that this will ever happen on a wide scale, as since then the barn doors have been flung wide open by the explosion in the use of GPS which followed the demise of SA.
GPS is now everywhere. Delivery vans, trucks and emergency vehicles have GPS modules on the roof so controllers know exactly where they are. Some trains use GPS to work out where they are and make sure that things like automated next station announcements are fired off at the right time. Perhaps the most obvious area in which GPS-enabled hardware has become a ubiquitous commodity is in car navigation systems. For a few hundred quid you can get a dinky box from Dixons which when plonked on your car dashboard will work out the route to the address you're headed for and nag you when it's time to turn left, or right, or go straight over the roundabout, or whatever. This is, when you think about it, some quite amazing technology.
To my eternal shame I've bought two GPS units this year. One is the Garmin Forerunner 201, a teeny unit which straps onto my wrist and tells me all kinds of interesting things about what I'm doing - pace per km (or pace per whatever), distance travelled, exactly where I've been, how to get home (if I get lost), and so on. I can then download all of this into my PC and spend hours obsessing over statistics. It's a fantastic little toy and a fine example of the specialist uses people are finding for GPS.
The other one is a little more sophisticated - the Garmin eTrex Vista C. This is a more general-purpose GPS, but it's still quite incredible to have a dinky palm-sized box stuck in my pocket which not only tells me where I am, but gives me directions to where I'm going and beeps angrily to tell me to, say, take the next right. As I have a nasty habit of failing to plan properly and therefore getting lost when I'm in unfamiliar places, it's proving very useful indeed even if the maps aren't quite as beautiful as the paper maps produced by the Ordnance Survey.
So. GPS - in a few short years from niche-market specialist tool to ubiquitous public utility. With the upcoming European navigation constellation GALILEO set to be in service by 2008 and the ongoing development of various augmentation systems designed to make GPS even more accurate for precision operations such as landing aircraft automatically, it seems there are still more interesting applications out there for this technology.
People who know me will probably be aware that I have (to put it mildly) something of an inferiority complex about certain things, one of which is my inability to do maths of a more complicated nature than "2+2=4". The main reason I dropped out of my university course all those years ago was that the maths was just too complicated for me to handle - after a while all those alephs and phis and integrals just kind of merged into a giant incomprehensible blur.
I have decided after a decade (as a kind of early new year's resolution) that ten years of kicking myself and feeling thick for not being good at maths is enough. Although it's been quite a long time since I've done any maths in anger, I just went to the college bookshop and bought a copy of Stroud. Anyone who's ever done anything maths-related at a university level will probably recognise this book - it's one of the best textbooks out there, period, and the diligent student who works through it doing the exercises as they go will generally end up knowing at least a little maths.
As it's a book (a huge heavy book, but a book nonetheless) it'll be a useful thing for some forthcoming long journeys and idle moments away from the computer. I'm perversely looking forward to brushing up my rusty maths skills and maybe, just maybe, conquering some of the difficult areas which defeated me before. Not that differential equations are something which I have to do on a regular basis, mind you, but I still think it's time to be able to say that I know how to solve them.
I sat down today intending to write a critical piece contrasting the latest recording of Do They Know It's Christmas with the 1984 original. I was going to talk about how bland the new version is compared with the old one, about how the almost egoless original made when they simply didn't know if it would work or not contrasts with the showbiz snippiness that manifested itself in the admittedly minor row over who got to sing "But tonight thank God it's them instead of you" in the new version. I was going to say that well, at least it wasn't as dreadful as the almost-forgotten Band Aid II recording from 1989. I was going to wish that they'd written a new song instead. I was going to say that ultimately, while the original still moves me every time I hear it, the new one didn't move me at all.
But my thoughts drifted, and I realised that rather than whining about what's fundamentally a well-intentioned effort to raise funds for places where they're needed it would be better to talk about something else. If you want snarky reviews of the new single, go Google. There are plenty of them out there, so let's not bother with wasting bytes on yet another one.
I was eleven when the original version of Do They Know It's Christmas was released. Live Aid happened a month after my twelfth birthday. As far as political awareness was concerned I didn't have much other than the idealism of the average twelve-year-old growing up in a pleasant middle-class environment. But I can remember sitting watching Live Aid and being happy that for once, the world was pulling together as individuals in an apolitical way to help people who needed help right now.
But now I'm older, and I'm a computer geek. I do UNIX consultancy at a daily rate which, although far cheaper than many others, is still pretty obscene by comparison with what the rest of the world has to live on. I live in London, and after I've paid tax on my daily rate it's enough to pay something like half my monthly rent. The money I have left over goes in the bank for me to pay myself with during lean times, where it gains interest. And that's about it.
Every so often I look at myself and think that there has to be something I can do to help out the vast majority of the world which is less fortunate than me. I have a nice flat in Surbiton and a job which (at least so far) pays far more than I really need to live on without even having to work full-time. I have clean water straight from the tap. I have affordable, safe and reliable food supplies available from the shops around the corner. If I get sick my GP's surgery is three minutes walk away, and if I get really sick I've got some of the best healthcare in the world available - at no end user cost - from the NHS. I'm pretty damn lucky. Virtually everybody who reads this page will be similiarly lucky to some extent. Some will be even luckier.
But there are billions of people who aren't so lucky. Billions of people who live in squalid slum conditions or have no home at all. Billions of people who have to walk miles to collect unsafe drinking water. Billions of people who live on starvation rations or other peoples' food waste if they get to eat at all. Billions of people with no access to healthcare due to it being simply not available or just unaffordable.
When you think about that, we're not that badly off, are we?
We like to pretend in the computer industry that we're impoverished and poorly paid. In the main, we're talking complete bullshit. For a lot of IT workers, "poor" simply means "it'll be a few months before I can afford a new Powerbook" or "I won't be able to buy a new iPod until next month". Sure, there are plenty of us for whom money is tight as well, but there are a lot more of us for whom it's really not, however much we like to pretend that it is.
Now, let's get down to business.
What I would love to see happen, and what I'd love to help make happen, is to encourage people in the computing and IT businesses - employees, contractors, consultants, consulting houses - to donate just one day's income in a coordinated effort on one day somewhere in the near-to-middling future. One lousy day's pay. That's all. If you can't really afford a day, fine - donate half a day or a couple of hour's pay. Every little helps, certainly, but a whole lot helps a lot more than a little. And, hey, you don't have to be a computer geek to contribute. Lawyers, plumbers, everyone's welcome.
Think about it. If 500 people donate £500, that's a quarter of a million quid. If 5000 people donate £250 that's £1,250,000. Anything more than that and we're starting to talk serious money. But why stop with pounds? The Internet's global. Throw in a few million US dollars and a bunch of yen and Euros and Aussie dollars and it would be possible to raise enough money to do our bit as an industry, enough to help make a real difference and be able to say "Hey, we helped to do that." Oh, yeah, and as this often persuades the self-employed to spend money: charitable donations are, I believe, exempt from tax in the UK through the Gift Aid scheme, and no doubt exempt in many other countries as well.
But what's the money to go on? The Band Aid model seems to work. There are places which need help right now, and a mixture of providing essential and immediate funding for relief agencies to purchase what they need to do their work and investment in longer-term projects aimed at helping people return to independent living while giving them something to make a living from seems like a good plan. Hey, if this was a computer geek-originated fund it might even be a good idea to fund grassroots IT initiatives in places where they aren't able to take access to computers and communications for granted - projects like this one, maybe. And even if there wasn't an immediate need for any money which was left over, it would earn a nice healthy rate of interest in the bank enabling it to help more people in the future when it was needed. Good deal, eh? Ultimately, the fund's financial details and accounts would be openly published on the net so that anyone who cared to look could check that they'd been used in a worthwhile manner.
Oh, yeah. The working title for the project - Geek Aid. It'd probably change to something less nerdy but dammit, Jim, I'm a computer geek, not a branding consultant.
I've got plenty of spare time at the moment. I spend far too much of it doing nothing. I'd love to be able to spend it doing something, so I'm happy to do some of the legwork for a project like this and investigate the necessary red tape. Anyone want to help? Most needed right now would be someone to design a website, and someone to host it, because my web skills ain't that good.
After all, if Premiership footballers can do it, so can we. And there are a whole lot more of us, even if we're not all quite so well paid.
Mike
PS: I'm not interested in hearing any of the following, so don't bother commenting if that's all you were going to say:
PPS: To put my money where my mouth is - if this project comes off, I'll donate one day's worth at my undiscounted daily rate. Just to be clear, okay?
This photo is specially aimed at anyone who's posted a photo on sorryeverybody.com (warning, extremely slow right now probably due to overloading):
![[Response]](http://uffish.net/images/embed/sorry.jpg)
I think the rest of the world should return the compliment that site pays to us, and remember that as with anywhere, there's a lot more variety in the USA and its people than the convenient stereotypes a lot of people like to deal in would suggest.
After the events of today I think there are some things I should really talk about because they affect us all. There are some contests which are so important, and so close, and so critical to the survival of our civilisation that I think it would be massively isolationist and cynical to ignore them.
That's right. I want to decide whether the Daleks or the Cybermen are the bigger threat to humanity. Plenty of people have done this before, but I feel entitled to my own moment of punditry on the subject.
The Daleks are probably the most British of evil races. They're the Austin Allegro of universal domination - plodding and inefficient and achieving results mostly by confusing people into thinking they're looking at something far scarier. It's as if Davros had subcontracted British Leyland to design a mobile war machine for world domination purposes in 1973.
"Right, Alf. That'll do. It's got a place for the green blob guy to sit and it moves around. Now, the lads came up with a suggestion for a multiply redundant armoured vision system with 360-degree coverage and dual rapid-fire guns to provide overlapping fields of protection. But the project budget won't handle that, so we'll just have an eye on an easily-damaged stalk and an easily grabbable single gun with no other protection. The punters'll never know the difference, they'll buy it anyway. No, we won't have the twin remote manipulation arms with multiple joints and selectable ends either - a sucker on a stick will let them prod things if they ever want to manipulate objects, which isn't something anyone ever really does anyway, do they?. It'll be fine. A bit of decoration might be nice, though. Oh, I know, some blobs. Yes, blobs are stylish. Great idea. Nice."
When they're actually in action working on dominating the world they always remind me of Dad's Army. While they're quite good at hanging around looking ominous, appearing unexpectly from round a dark corner and barking out simple orders like "Move!" and "Obey!", when push comes to shove they have a nasty habit of running around in panicky circles like Corporal Jones shouting "My vision is impaired! I cannot see!", firing wildly at walls and eventually getting so excited by all this that they spontaneously explode. If the opportunity arises to exterminate something that's standing still and helplessly cornered, they'll usually get so excited at the prospect that they'll shout "Exterminate!" for about ten minutes before looking back to find that the prospective exterminee has wandered off to get a cup of tea.
So much for the Daleks. 10/10 for trying, guys, but you need to learn to seize the day, focus on your objectives and work on achieving them rather than just boasting a lot about how powerful you are and how the universe will bow down to you or you'll kill them for being disrespectful. If you want to do that, I suggest a career in hip-hop.
As far as the Cybermen are concerned, however.. well, I think there's something French about them. They talk strangely, sometimes incomprehensibly and always grandiosely. You'll never hear a Cyberman being casual. "Leader! I have made you a cup of tea!" "Excellent!".
What's more French about them, though, is their fashion sense. Every time you see them they're dressed differently. Between attempts at destroying humanity, the suburbs of Mondas rattle with the sound of sewing machines as the Cyberfamily runs up a new outfit. Shops experience runs on silver spray paint and whatever the must-have fashion item of the season is - ping pong balls, moon boots, flight suits, PVC zip-up jackets, flared trousers, white balaclavas, whatever.
Once the basic outfit's in place, it's time to accessorise. Bits of tubing, car headlights, more ping-pong balls, whatever comes to hand is employed to create the season's must-be-seen Cyberlook. Once it's all there and in place, world domination can finally return to the fore and they set off for the next remote Earth outpost on the list.
There they stomp around for a bit and menace people (they're good at menacing, Cybermen) while feeling insecure about the fact that their gear will probably be already out of fashion on Mondas and that they'll get laughed at when they get home. While distracted by this, some untrendy human in a jumpsuit turns up and rubs gold into their chest. "Gnnnnrgggh!", moans the Cyberman metallically, "Gold.. with this outfit.. noooooooo....." and expires from sheer embarrassment. And that's the end of another attempt at world domination, and it's back to the pattern books again.
So the Cybermen manage to be fantastically menacing - after all, seven-foot tall silver men who can kill you with a single karate chop are automatically menacing - they can stomp around convincingly, they can even climb stairs, but once again they fail when it comes to commitment. Once again, they're too easily distracted to engage in effective world domination.
Who wins, then, in this battle? I can't decide. It's more or less a dead heat, but as the Cybermen can actually menace people fairly effectively rather than just waggling a stick with a sucker on the end at them as they head for the nearest staircase I think they probably come out just ahead. But only just.
Having realised some time ago that I'm not as fit as I was in my younger days, I finally got around to doing something about it this weekend. Yes, I bought a pair of running shoes. Oh, yes, and tried going for a run. Given that I can walk until the cows come home but am otherwise fairly unfit, I wasn't expecting much. This low expectation was emphasised by the number of "beginner's guides" out there on the web which suggest things like walking for 5 minutes three times a week for the first month, and I was fully prepared for my legs to fall off in protest as soon as I dared leave the flat wearing my alarmingly new and shiny-looking running shoes and a pair of shorts.
I thought a half-hour see-how-it-goes session would be a good plan - walk when necessary, run when necessary, and try not to drop dead. For good measure I left my glasses behind so as to not have to see passers-by bursting into hysterical laughter. This plan worked quite well in the end, and I soon worked out that the thing to do is only walk when nobody's looking. If anyone happens to appear while you're walking, look at your watch (pretend it's an expensive heart rate monitor and you're checking your recovery rate), do that little double-bounce thing and start running again.
Having arrived home 28 minutes later, I found I'd covered just over 3km. This means that I ran and/or walked a distance which I could have probably walked in that time at a decent pace - but dammit, it's the thought that counts. And I got to feel all self-righteous and exercised afterwards. And my muscles are telling me today that I did something unpleasant to them.
Still - it should get better if the process is repeated every couple of days for a while. Maybe in a year or so I'll be able to run 5km in under half an hour, eh?
I am proud to announce that I seem to have found a fact that's not already somewhere on the Web. I have at least found a fact that can't be found through Google, unless I got my search terms wrong.
So, in celebration of this, I'm prepared to reveal this brand new fact, the first for years, exclusively right here on this page.
And that fact is.. (drum roll)
In episode 4 of the first series of the BBC's television adaptation of The Tripods by John Christopher (also on DVD), the sequence where the three fugitives explore an abandoned Paris Metro station is shot on the down platform at Bank station on the Waterloo and City Line, now part of London Underground but at the time still part of British Rail. More on the Waterloo & City Line here, here and here. The line has long been a popular location for filiming as it is closed on Sundays.
Free bonus facts - the station has been dressed to look like Porte de la Chapelle station, where Metro line 12 terminates. The train in the platform is the old W&C rolling stock, built in 1940 (and which lasted in service until the early nineties).
T
