Looking Out To Sea

A year ago we were at a wedding in Glasgow. Six months ago we were at a wedding in Milngavie. Obviously I needed an excuse to get a haircut again so I neatly arranged for my aunt to get married on the May Day weekend — cunning, eh? — and we went down for a great weekend on the south coast of England. My aunt Pamela and her family live in a little town near Worthing, only five minutes walk from the sea. They’ve been together for nearly as long as I’ve been alive but clearly decided it was worth getting this marriage thing done at some point! Their daughter said lots of people were asking whether she was happy to no longer be a bastard, which is a strange question if ever there was one. Does bastardry get removed retroactively? :-)

Unusually I was the only person there in a kilt, which was strange but quite enjoyable. I assumed there would be at least one other Scotsman there but apparently not. Stranger, though, was how unusual it seemed — it’s like the other guests had never seen anyone in a kilt before. Lots of people asked us “so are you Scottish?”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We flew down on Friday night from Glasgow because Helen was in class until 5pm. The train from Gatwick was easy though I couldn’t help being alarmed at the names of places we passed — are Lancing and Goring-by-Sea quaint villages or ways to die in battle? Pamela picked us up from the station and we stayed in their spare room for the duration of our visit.

On Saturday morning the house was transformed for the post-wedding reception. My mum and her other sisters and brother came in and everybody swept and mopped and made sandwiches and so on.

The ceremony at Worthing Registrar was in a fairly small modern room. The readings were lovely and the couple looked incredibly happy. Back at their house we drank champagne and the weather blessed us with a warm sunny afternoon. Stood in the garden talking nonsense to various people who wanted to know why I was wearing a kilt…

After the best man speech and the cutting of the cake and consumption of more sandwiches we all trooped out to a cafe on the beach front for a meal and live jazz and dancing. The food was excellent and the band really good too, and I think everyone really enjoyed themselves.

We left at the same time as my mum who was driving back to the cottage they had hired in Arundel. I don’t know why we departed at that point but realised when we got back to the house we were staying at that the people with the keys were still chatting back at the party. We sat on a bench near the front door in the darkness, drinking whisky from a hipflask and enjoying the silence. It’s such a strange quiet place: no traffic, no street lights. Just darkness and silence.

Next day we sat round the kitchen table in the conservatory while the rain lashed the windows. Mid-afternoon it had died down a bit so a bunch of us trooped out to a restored 18th century windmill which was really good if you’re a bit of a nerd like me, though the weather was crap for it. They didn’t have any wind-milled flour in the visitor centre shop because it had all sold out. They only mill once or twice a year but clearly we arrived at just the wrong point.

In the evening Helen and I took the train into Brighton to see some friends who were also in the area for a few days. We forgot/left behind our phones so had to wait around in the cold at the arranged meeting point wondering “is this how things were done before mobile phones?” and being a bit miserable. The rain had stopped but the wind was bitter. Some guy was skinny-dipping in the sea beside the pier and quickly turned from pink to blue when he came back out. Then his friends — loose term — proceeded to slap him with his leather belt while he tried to get dressed again with numb hands. I don’t think I’d be sticking my neck out to suggest alcohol was involved.

There was a restaurant that came recommended (“English’s”) but was full so went next door. I think this place was called The Gallery. Food was quite nice though we did end up with a green-dye-swirled meringue as the base of the Pavlova. We later discovered that there is a Brighton shop which sells meringues swirled with a variety of dyes, though why they chose the St Patrick’s Day meringue to build a Pavlova around is anyone’s guess. Eating was made difficult through laughing at the colour.

We spent Monday back in Brighton again with our baggage this time. Absurdly enough, Brighton, tourist town that it is, has decided that left luggage is the work of the devil and they’ve removed every trace of it from the public facilities. We know this for certain because we asked at the bus station, the train station and the travel centre. This curtailed our day as we couldn’t really wander comfortably around with several bags of luggage. We cut our losses and went to Gatwick early. Checked everything in and had a nice meal at Cafe Rouge in the secure area while watching the board for our gate to open.

We got back to Edinburgh on time but sat on the runway for a while because our berth was being occupied by an EasyJet flight that wasn’t moving. Don’t know why. We got in eventually, though I didn’t mind because I had my book with me. Aeroplanes are much more comfortable on the ground, without the noise and the juddering and the earache. It helped that the plane was mostly empty.

There should be some photos of all this to come but they’ve not been sifted and cropped yet. I’ll put up a post later on with photos when they’re ready.

Mac users may (not) want to try this:

• Press and hold the ctrl-alt-cmd keys (the three left-most keys on the bottom row)
• Then repeatedly tap the full stop key

You may stop when your display looks a bit stupid. To reverse the process hold down the three modifiers and tap the comma key instead.

Now, tell me how you would manage all that by accident. Twice. And not notice that you were doing it either time until it was already done.

Once you’ve managed that, try dragging Mail.app from /Applications onto your desktop and doing a system update in a multi-user system. It is possible (though how, I am still unsure) to update the copy on your desktop while leaving an old copy elsewhere which other users will still try to use. The old version will cease to work if the OS update leaves it incompatible with the rest of the system.

All this is possible! All this can be yours!

I am still attempting to catch up with everything that’s been happening lately. Last week we met a bunch of Helen’s relatives from the US (and her parents) for a meal and then went to the theatre.

We ate at Blue, the restaurant attached to the Traverse. I met Helen’s cousin, cousin’s husband and baby girl. Also Helen’s aunt, who I dimly recall meeting before, but that would be about eight years ago.

We saw Hoors at the Traverse Theatre, written by the same guy who did Black Watch. It’s a bit more low-key than the military play but still wickedly funny. The ending seemed a bit abrupt though. I’m still not sure what it was supposed to be. Helen thought that was a break for the interval because it was such a non-ending.

On Monday my parents took us out to see Cabaret at the Playhouse. I admit I’m not a great fan of musicals, and Cabaret exemplifies everything I don’t like about them.

• The plot was almost non-existent. In fact, I’m not even sure there was one.
• That doesn’t matter, because whatever could have happened in the story would have been irrelevant, because I didn’t care in the least for any of the characters.
• The songs were indistinct so I couldn’t really tell what they were singing about anyway. Even the one song I did know — that would be the title song — was pretty mumbled.

Oh well, I knew I didn’t like musicals. I did see something horrifying, something that completely blew my mind. A woman sitting in the row in front had a Cliff Richard diary. Will horrors never cease?

Anyway, here’s Cabaret, the song,in BSL.

Today I fixed my parents’ computer (Mac Mini) after receiving many obscure and unhelpful complaints that it wasn’t working properly. I was really dubious that there was going to be something wrong with the monitor, because the problem only manifested with my father’s login.

It turns out he’d managed to — somehow — turn the screen contrast up from Normal to Maximum. (Those playing along at home can look in System Preferences then Universal Access for the relevant setting.) This renders much of the text invisible, and what’s left wispy and hard to read. I really don’t know what this option was supposed to accomplish, given that it’s presumably meant as a accessibility feature.

I also don’t know how it was accidentally enabled. The effect is very obvious, so I don’t know how it could be turned on without it being very obvious what happened. The hotkey (why the hell does this thing need a hotkey?!) is Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-. to increase contrast and Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-, to decrease it. It’s conceivable that the hotkey could be leaned on, but I tried it on Helen’s machine and it doesn’t seem possible to enable it without going in to the System Preferences first.

The conclusion was happy — I disabled the stupid option so reading email and watching iPlayer is now unimpeded. But how it happened in the first place is completely beyond me.

I’ve had a cracking evening so I thought I’d take a few minutes to show you what I’ve been up to. It’s been a mixture of learning and supplementing the Diagrams package as before.

I’ve started a new repository at to store the test material I’m using. That way I can make it public without cluttering up the package with unnecessary files and commits.

First, I would like to introduce my brother. He will be helping us this evening, in the manner of Debbie McGee. (He will survive, in one piece. It’s just magic folks…) One of the additions I have made to the package is the ability to save on top of another image. Instead of a plain white background, you can load something from disk and put your diagram onto that.

We’ll see it all in action here, with the help of my brother (as mentioned). Excuse me if the code is a bit sloppy. As mentioned this is my scratch pad for developing features, so it’s quite a crufty place to work!

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Does rent control really mean you can get an apartment large enough to film a trendy sitcom in? Will it be a steal? Two old friends are going to New York to find out, and there was a ceilidh at the weekend in their honour. Nick came along too, as there was apparently a surfeit of women and they needed men to even up the numbers. What wasn’t really explained was that most of these women were old ladies or nursing mothers who sat at the side chatting anyway. So actually, in a terrifying first for dance events, there seemed to be significantly more men on the floor than women.

Next day Helen made another Nigella recipe for breakfast. She hasn’t blogged it yet so I won’t reveal more. I didn’t particularly like it. :-( Nick and I returned to Edinburgh mid-afternoon. I was quite impressed with my ability to guide him to the flat by sheer guesswork. Well, this should be the right direction…

I got home on Sunday afternoon and watched Blade Runner (the director’s cut). I’m quite keen to know what Ridley Scott came up with for the recent Final Director’s Cut For Real This Time edition. Also, I’ve never seen the original version with the infamous voice-over. It sounds hilariously bad, and I’ve read quotes from Harrison Ford saying that they kept on dragging him back to record more and more appalling monologue, and every time he would go, kicking and screaming. I have also never seen one with the “happy ending” that Wikipedia mentions.

There was a man on the bus this evening who was furiously scribbling little mathematical notations on a grubby piece of paper. I was so curious to find out what he was doing! He was really going for it — several lines of closely-written squiggles. The only things I could make out properly were the long division lines separating numerator from denominator, and some Σs.

Was it maths? Physics? Engineering? I want to know! :-) It makes such a change from people reading Jackie Collins or talking loudly on their phones.

I got a phone call this afternoon from my aunt and uncle asking if my parents were okay in China. They are fine, though there might be difficulty getting out of the country now? I’m not sure, maybe there is not much disruption. It’s a very large place, after all.

We finally got our mortgage from the building society confirmed today. At last! Luckily it’s open on Saturday, so we’re going out right now to

• Get breakfast at the farmer’s market.
• Pick up exciting debt from the building society.

Meanwhile my parents will have arrived in Xi’an by now to visit my brother. So I’ve got to keep Skype open in case they want to try some international calls!

We went home at the weekend and I had my first play of a Wii, and have an incredibly sore shoulder/arm now. That tube of ibuprofen gel must have been there for a reason. But Helen are now decided — we definitely need a big television. ;-)