We’ve been surviving thus far with a couple of open WiFi connections that we could pick up. Neither were very close to us — this requires careful positioning of laptops to maintain signal levels — but they were still usable.

Were usable. Past tense. On Thursday night both of the networks we used disappeared. One of them hasn’t come back and the other has but appears broken. I can occasionally get an IP address but it doesn’t forward packets past the router. :-( We are bereft, cast loose in a sea of microwaves, all encrypted… we’ve been really suffering!

We’re currently in Montpeliers, downing cocktails and jealously guarding access to the power socket that is powering my laptop. I can highly recommend their Whisky Sour, which is really delightful, and the Espresso Cocktail, which was apparently made with the wrong ingredients but tasted grand anyway. It’s pouring with rain outside and I feel no motivation to get wet.

Email and blogging may be rather light this weekend because we’ll be snatching whatever access is available in cafés and bars (carrying an Eee around is awesome). Please bear with us!

I looked around on the Lothian Buses website but found nothing. So I wrote them an email. I suggested they make the data available as some text feed or RSS — something simple to manipulate. I never got a response.

But earlier this year someone else noticed that Bus Tracker had been launched, which provides a front end to the bus data I was looking for. They had also added links to Google Maps to plot the stops of a bus, or to interactively choose your nearest bus stop. It’s a damned interesting site — not very pretty but quite powerful.

I thought it would be useful/interesting to write a program to query the BusTracker site. At this point I’m just writing a library to do the tasks. Wrapping an interface around this can come at a later date.

The full library can be found online, or get the darcs repository with:

darcs get http://www.dougalstanton.net/code/buses/

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The great thing about British herbal medicine, of course, is that it’s automatically geared to be very compatible with your physiology.

That’s foreign herbs bad, native herbs good for those still boggling.

There’s something unnatural about the signing that’s hard to get past though. Maybe it’s the lack of facial expression, which is very unusual. Thoughts? I haven’t been able to find any more information about the video other than the advertising company behind it.

The audience was full of parents and little kids. I was fully expecting to see someone from my work there. It was exactly the intersection of geeky interest and child-friendly that I’d expect to draw my colleagues, who all seem to have kids. But no!

The film was great though. It managed to take the central character of a robotic can crusher and create a romance. Pixar’s ability to create emotion and expression never ceases to amaze. Not to mention our own ability to fall for their animated charms as if they were real people.

Also, contains the most intelligent cockroach ever to appear on the silver screen.

It seems to be the done thing for doors to open a very long time before anything happens on stage. It was four and half hours between doors open (4pm) and Radiohead taking the stage. I’m pretty sure if they cut that time in half there would be fewer drunk, antisocial jerks in the crowd, throwing drinks over people and knocking each other over.

The show was really good. Ben tried to memorise the set list but I don’t know if he succeeded; here’s one on a fan site. The wonders of the internet! They played everything off the new album except House of Cards, which happens to be one of my favourites.

The support were Bat for Lashes — very good. Kind of Björk with darker music. (I’m assured Björk can be very dark but I’ve never heard her do stuff like this.) Give the album Fur and Gold a listen.

I mentioned in a previous post that Citylink were really rubbish when I tried to book transport to Glasgow. Well, not nearly as bad as when it came to putting on the transport. I paid for special “event” tickets, which would theoretically bus us from Edinburgh to Glasgow Green and then back again afterwards. The bus took us to Glasgow’s main station on Buchanan Street, so we had to make our own way across the city (buying an A–Z in the process). After the gig there were no buses to be seen so we went back to the bus station, which was chaos. The drivers insisted there were buses waiting empty at Glasgow Green but it’s pretty obvious why they were empty — because nobody knew where they were. Being a ticketed event there was only one entrance/exit to the Radiohead show, but wherever the buses were parked it wasn’t in front of this entrance. Nor were there any signs to tell you where they’d be parked. I felt quite embarrassed for convincing our friends that the bus would be better than the train, considering it turned out to be slower, more uncomfortable and not as advertised.

I spent all day yesterday and half of this morning trying to book tickets to get to Glasgow. I was repeatedly told by the online ordering system:

Please Note: There are currently no fares available for your origin and destination. This may be because you have selected an open return. Please go back and plan your journey again using the return option.

Naturally this error message appears whether you choose Single, Return or Open Return. If I was unlucky the search would fail completely because the hamsters were having their postprandial snooze.

I emailed them to let them know their site was crap (well, I was slightly more constructive than that). They replied an hour later telling me to upgrade my Java installation — they even directed me to http://www.java.com. This was all rather suspicious, because not only do I have the latest Java install, but their site doesn’t even use Java. It does use Javascript extensively, but (1) the two languages are completely unrelated and (2) Javascript cannot be updated by going to that website. This may cause some minor confusion for the layman but I would hope the person who emailed me, the System Development Assistant, would know what languages they use when developing their system! I say the site doesn’t use Java, but I mean on my computer. Their website appears to run with Java Servlets but that’s all on their computers. There’s nothing that me fiddling with my settings will do.

Just out of interest I fired up IE6 in Windows and tried again. It worked! Well, maybe there is something wrong with Firefox after all… but no, my usual system was now working fine. What had they changed?

So, do you think they told me to look for the tartan paint while they fixed everything in the background? I’m quite inclined to send them a rude email back asking them not to take the piss.

There are several obstacles to taking BSL 3. Cost (£2000 per year for two years) and location (college/university) are important, as well as the fact that I don’t really feel capable of it. I think a lot of people lost motivation over the year. Mostly I’ve improved but there has been a significant degree of backsliding too.

What now? We have neither the time nor the money to devote to the next level, so it seems this is where we have to stop. We need some time to practise regularly to keep the skills fresh. Facebook has a Sign Edinburgh group, for monthly practice sessions, which seems to be dormant at the moment. I’ve been trying to get a reaction from the current members without luck.

I hope we’ll be able to maintain contact with a few of the people from class as well. If all else fails we can just form our own drinking signing group. Tuesdays from now on will be a little duller without it all.

With slightly more immediate effect, we can start watching signed television again, on BBC iPlayer. This is great news for — watching real television shows (rather than the talking-heads stuff we used in class) is much more interesting.

• Chocolate gingerbread (from Nigella Lawson’s Feast)
• Banana and walnut loaf (from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course)
• Flapjack (from Katie Stewart’s A Young Cook’s Calendar)
• Pain façon beaucaire (from Richard Bertinet’s Dough)

It was quite a busy but very productive day. I’m just sorry I didn’t think to take any photographs. So instead I’ve posted a photo of the Ice Cream Cake that Helen made. If I was being properly critical I would say the banana loaf didn’t turn out very well (maybe the bananas weren’t properly over-ripe) and the bread looked a bit funny (but still tasted great).

On Tuesday we had our second last BSL class. Alarmingly I have to redo one of the assessments because (typically enough for me) I wasn’t participating enough. This assessment was a three person discussion/debate, with one of the participants a tutor to lead the discussion and introduce the topics. I’m quite nervous about repeating the same mistakes this week. We’ll just have to see.

By Friday we were both pretty tired. All week the weather had been hotter than expected. We spent the evening eating takeaway pasta from La Favorita and drinking wine with Emily. The throbbing sensation in my head the next morning was there to remind me how much more wine I drank than I should have.

Saturday afternoon we were at Lawrence’s for his birthday barbecue. Watched certified-fire-loon Rory set fire to things — marshmallows, slices of lemon, whatever else was to hand. Burning marshmallows quickly move between pleasant sweet, acrid sweet and oh-god-i’m-trapped-in-a-smoke-machine. It starting chucking it down later on, so we didn’t go back out to another party (guilty guilty). Also, we hadn’t put any thought or effort into costumes,

(Fascinating aside: I’ve just noticed that someone found my website by searching for the phrase “robert kilroy silk cannot die soon or painfully enough”. And indeed, I’m hit number two when I search for that without quotes.)

On Sunday Keith and Jo came by on a brief visit before heading back down to London. Jez came round for the afternoon too. I made more bread which was doubleplusgood. Jo also gave me a recipes for her grandmother’s Irish soda bread, which was typically folksy in its details: one loaf has “about 3 handfuls” of flour. It turns out that Jo and Jez, who were both staying for tea, are almost dietary complements of each other, since one is a pescetarian and the other doesn’t eat seafood. This makes cooking interesting, especially cooking from Nigella. There’s a lot of meat and a lot of fish recipes and precious little else.

Those are the highlights of my week. I’m ready to drop now.