Looking Out To Sea

Friday night was another of Radiohead’s gigs on Glasgow Green. Many years ago they brought a whole tent to the green. This time it was just a stage, so we all stood outside in the rain.

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.

Citylink are a bunch of useless amateurs that don’t have the guts to admit their uselessness when it’s pointed out to them.

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.

That’s it, finished. I have now passed the SQA course for British Sign Language Level 2. This makes it seem much more like a qualification than I have considered it to be. It has been nice in the past to get the certificate (when it eventually comes) but the point of it has been learning.

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.

This is the guy that wrote the bread book I’m always raving about. I’d embed the video here but there doesn’t seem an easy way to do that. Watch him make sweet dough for doughnuts and so on.

It’s been a busy few days here. At the beginning of the week I had a birthday (I can’t remember if I mentioned that). I made some cake for work, instead of buying something from Greggs. I got a lot of compliments for the Chocolate Gingerbread, so I’m glad I went to the extra effort. It was also a good excuse to spend Sunday using our new pans and putting the oven through its paces. In fact that day I made:

• 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.

A few weeks ago Randall Munroe published XKCD 426: Geohashing and apparently invented a new sport…

The idea is quite simple. The world is divided into little degree-by-degree segments (by latitude and longitude). If you see these on a map they look mostly rectangular at the equator and gradually get more triangular at the poles, because the pole-wards side is shorter than the equator side. You can see a picture of the geographical segment around Edinburgh on the wiki.

If you imagine that each rectangle has a starting corner (the one nearest the equator and nearest the Greenwich meridian), which we’ll call (0.0, 0.0). We can identify any spot in your rectangle with a fractional offset from this point — like (0.456, 0.235).

If you want to know the major co-ordinates for your home then a good place to start would be this list for the major cities of the countries of the world.

I’ve put together a Haskell program to demonstrate the next stage of the procedure, though there are plenty of web-based tools to do the same thing. I just wanted to try out the new cabal-install package (akin to CPAN, gems etc for other languages).

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I’ve had less time to read since we moved house. I’m now within walking distance of work so I don’t have the chance to read on the bus while commuting. But I have managed to finish A Life Stripped Bare: Tiptoeing Through The Ethical Minefield by Leo Hickman.

He’s a writer for the Guardian who wrote about his attempts at living the “ethical” lifestyle. The difference being that he was not a green activist or eco-warrior type. It’s interesting to see how the changes he tried to put in place conflicted with his pragmatic needs and his usual way of doing things.

Ethical Audit

The story starts with a trio of “ethical auditors” coming to his house to interrogate the family and show them all the ways in which their lifestyle was unethical. I admit to disagreeing violently with most of what the auditors said, and being in violent agreement with the rest.

At the time it was just a dislike of their claims. For instance, suggesting that the contents of the medicine cupboard (painkillers and cold remedies, I suppose) “only treat the symptoms”. As if that wasn’t the point! Then they had the gall to suggest homeopathy as an alternative (slogan: “it doesn’t even treat the symptoms”?).

The auditors were not above implying imminent danger for the couple and their young daughter — toxins in the cleaning products, in the baby’s bedroom, in the food and so on. And I began to wonder what was supposed to be ethical about the “ethical auditors” — it was surely not their behaviour. I don’t consider it ethical to exaggerate or lie about the risks of whatever chemicals we are exposed to.

The unexamined life is not worth living. —Socrates

So with time I realised it wasn’t just that I disliked the specific claims they made, but that I rejected the auditors’ whole idea of an ethical life. It was unjustified and vague, and seemed to be just as uncritical as the author’s own lifestyle before they arrived.

The advice given was a mixture of typical pro-recycling, waste reduction advice, using public transport and walking more, etc, combined with more reactionary ideas about Big Pharma, GM, chemicalz!!1 and nuclear power. I feel quite content in my view that the auditors had little real idea what they were talking about, extrapolating from their demonstration of ignorance in the wide range of areas they did cover.

The idea of the book was interesting, in the same way that life-swapping reality shows are interesting: watching people living by other people’s rules. But there’s no way we can tell if what they are doing makes any difference. Everything was incredibly important/ dangerous/ relevant without qualifiers.

Good shopping, Good living

I have a copy of the Good Shopping Guide around here somewhere, from a few years ago. It also suffers from the same problem. Each company is given a score for its ethics, but they aren’t effectively weighted to take account of things that matter. Running nuclear power stations is just as liable to affect a company’s rating as having slave workers. That’s not really equivalent in my mind.

At least the Guide gives a breakdown for the different categories, so choosing things which matter to you is easier. I would rather be given real information, and valid reasons, to make up my own mind than the approach shown by the auditors of Leo Hickman’s book.

Last Christmas, when I went home to see my parents we found a cookery book I used to like as a child, though I never made much from it: A Young Cook’s Calendar by Katie Stewart (Piccolo, 1976). A bargain at 40 pence!

One of the recipes I do remember making a lot was flapjack. (I’m still very scathing about the flapjack available in shops. They’re never right.) This is the charming little introduction it gives before the recipe:

Flapjacks are everybody’s favourites. If you are going out for the morning wrap up a few pieces to put in your pocket. Take an apple too and you should last until lunchtime.

Hmm, tempting…

This is just a quick post to show off bits of our flat. Nothing very comprehensive, just some random photos. More photos on Helen’s Flickr page.

I made a couple of baguettes and a couple epis on Wednesday night. This is me pulling them out of the oven.

This is my Eee PC on our coffee table, with a tiny wooden chair behind it to add to the confused scale. Also, the name plate for our door that we haven’t put up yet.

Filling the holes and cracks in the front room before starting with the paint. Helen proved to be quite adept at this, but I was crap.

This is how the room started off, with bright pink walls, but it darkened as it dried to something less shocking. Notice the classy “3 Sisters” t-shirt?

• The knife-sharpening blocks with the little circular grinding stones inside are very effective.
• Two of the fingers on my left hand would say “too effective”. Ouch, blood, etc.