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.

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.

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.

So what’s been happening? Since Friday night we have been officially moving out/moving in, depending on what your frame of reference is. The whole time we were at the old flat we talked about “moving out” but now it seems a strange phrase. We moved in! We’re here now.

Nine months ago on our first night in the old flat we went to The Sizzling Scot for food. We ate large meals and got rather drunk on hand-poured measures of fine whisky. We decided a reprise was the best way to finish our time at the old flat. We went out together, ate rather too much, had a pleasant chat with the head waiter about moving house, and got given two whiskies before we left, this time on the house. A fine establishment!

We were up on Saturday morning to pack furiously, though I think the only things furious were the headaches. Between one and two o’clock a bunch of friends came with vehicles and we started ferrying stuff to the new flat. It just so happens that most of Edinburgh is closed or diverted at the moment because we’re working towards a city tram system in 2011. This makes moving across town all the trickier.

By about four o’clock the heat and the hard work had everyone else running for home and comfort. We still have at least one more car full of stuff to ferry over before we’ve properly “moved”. Even a couple of heavy bags and a rucksack taken by bus didn’t make much of a difference.

In the new place we are gradually making little safe havens — most notably the kitchen, which looks quite normal. (Apart from the missing dining table and chairs; that is a small flaw.) We spent a good evening yesterday unpacking lots of boxes and putting things in kitchen cupboards. Nothing is in a permanent position yet. We’ll just place everything and see what happens when we need to use things on a regular basis. Some stuff will be moved to easier access places, and other stuff hidden away.

Our furniture buying has been quite unsuccessful — unless you count ruling things out as a success. I think our biggest problem with the “ruling things out” technique is we don’t stop once we’ve ruled out all but one item. So having ruled everything out we have to start looking for more options.

As for successes — I baked bread this evening and Helen cooked stir fry. This counts as proper food preparation, I think, even if we only have one pan. I had some problems with the bread but it was my first time with this recipe and with this oven. Things will fall into place when I’ve had practice and more experience of both.

We’re both on holiday until Wednesday to give us time to get everything sorted — including transporting our old sofa to Helen’s brother and making a trip to Ikea for all those little essentials. More details to follow, when I can think of them.

The weather has been shockingly warm and sunny since the weekend. I’ve been leaving the flat in the morning without a dozen layers of clothes. I know people who have been sunburned. It gets quite stifling sometimes, though the sea breeze down at the shore makes up for that.

I’m still reading The Meme Machine but I should be finished reasonably soon. On Monday I went for a walk to look at furniture for the new flat, and popped into a bookshop on the way back. I bought The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed. It’s quite a small book but seems like it will be quite interesting.

Also just heard that two of my old flatmates are making a brief visit (to Scotland, I guess, since they live in London) on the weekend of the 17th. We won’t be in to the new flat by that point — not until the 23rd — but will still probably be overcome with excitement.

Tomorrow night is a Café Scientifique Special at the Camera Obscura. It will involve lasers, so obviously we’re both right in there. Lasers! Don’t know when we’ll get a chance to eat. I would suggest grabbing a quick bite from Wannaburger but Helen’s been pretty late out of work lately and it starts at 7 o’clock. We may have to eat afterwards.

What’s the latest on Thud?, I’m sure I heard you say. Well, bits and pieces. I’m still at the point where I don’t really have a good strategy for the AI, I’m just playing. But whenever I have an idea it takes a while to link it in to the current system. So I’d like to get some strategy combinators working. That might help to add a bit more structure to my code, which is looking quite messy now.

Also, I made some enquiries about other board game implementations and received some good replies from the Haskell Café list. A couple of notable ideas:

• Don’t bother holding an array for the board, just carry around separate lists for each piece. Makes it easy to locate friends and foes on an otherwise-quite-large board.
• Use Prompt to abstract ideas of user/computer interaction. I’ll have to look into this again but from what I remember it was quite an elegant way of containing a two-sided conversation (between user and computer, for example).

I also wrote a bit of simple network code to see how to write a server. I can connect to a known port with telnet and send the server messages; it sends back the number of characters in each line in return. It then hangs up on receiving “quit!” — not complex, but pretty close to what I need.

On Friday, Mat came round and we played Thud. As a means of exploring the territory, honest.

I’d asked him and a bunch of others if they could solve a trig problem I was having¹ which led to me explaining why I needed the answer, which led to Nick saying he’d like to get involved with this project too.

I’m writing a server-based game of Thud, so that Mat’s GUI client will have something to play against. Obviously big gobs of such a server is player AI for non-human players. Nick is the only one out of the three of us with genuine AI credentials, which will be helpful.

At the moment I’m throwing together simple heuristics as social potential fields and implementing them in the almost-bluntest way I can imagine. I haven’t got round to making a communication protocol yet, though it shouldn’t be difficult. The best step will be to look at how Mat’s client works, since the shorter the distance between the semantics of my protocol and his the better.

Naturally we’re going to have some hardcore language-advocacy arguments — my implementation is Haskell, Mat’s is C# and Nick wants to write in Java to play with a 3D framework he’s got his eye on. All in good spirits, of course. ;-)

If this comes to fruition in any way (I honestly don’t know how keen the other guys are, or how much free time they have for such things) it should be good fun. Solitary programming is enjoyable, but collectively working towards some goal provides an extra level of challenge and satisfaction.

Last night we were out at our friend Chris’s birthday party, with the theme of Board Games. Helen and I decided do go as Guess Who? with a bag full of disguises.

Inevitably we didn’t start preparations until quite late in the day. We got some fake fur from Sarah, for facial hair, but didn’t have anything to stick it with. She suggested tit tape — alas, ten past six on a Saturday is the wrong time to shop for such things.

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Went for a wander down to Stockbridge via the Water of Leith yesterday, and got caught in the rain while we were out. Thankfully we were both wearing spring-weather clothes and the rain was quite light.

We ended up in Avoca on a little side street, which was friendly and had excellent pub food. The steak ciabatta Helen had looked very tasty, and my chilli con carne was excellent, and the rice really fluffy too. Helen also had a sticky-toffee pudding which was very fluffy and oozing the volume of syrup Nigella would be proud of.

We met Sarah out there and she gave us some fake fur (more on that in a later post). It also turns out she didn’t realise we had a new flat, so that was pretty cool to have a chat about. We’ll need to get her round to our current flat for pudding some Sunday night, before we move away.

I’ve been fiddling with Mono lately, the free software implementation of the Microsoft .Net system. I say, fiddling, mostly just looking at. My good friend Matt wrote a network game of Thud! in C# for Windows. I was trying to get it working under Linux.

I’m happy to say that migrating a Visual Studio project with MonoDevelop worked flawlessly for me. Then I just hit Build Project and it worked. The game is human-player only, so I wanted to write a rudimentary AI to play against. (I don’t really know how to play, so I think I could beat me fairly easily.)

Then I hit this bug in the Mono system which causes complete failure whenever you try to open a network connection — but only if your machine has a dynamic IP address. Yeah, I know…

I wanted to simplify the networking protocol (currently it’s the default .Net serialisation system, which is rather opaque). That will have to wait until I can play the game without crashing it.