Not just gone down but gone down by a whole five minutes in fact. This is quite a nice feat as far as I’m concerned.

I also recently signed up for Fitocracy, a strange mix of social networking, exercise and tabletop gaming statistics. In its basic operation you put down whenever you do any exercise and it gives you “points”. With increasing numbers of points you pass “levels”. Each new level requires greater numbers of points to complete. A walk in the park is worth fewer points than a marathon or an evening’s training at the boxing gym. So the idea is you get an idea of your achievements using their points metric.

Many aspects of Fitocracy are gym-oriented, and frankly I hate gyms and everything about them. So I’ll just have to make my own challenges, of which there are bound to be plenty.

The film starts off pretty weak and confused — Loki, previously seen in Thor, breaks into our world through a wormhole opened by an energy cube previously seen in Captain America, but ultimately stolen from Odin. (Are you folks paying attention at the back there?) There’s a shoot-out, a clumsy chase scene and a huge chunk of military base gets destroyed.

It picked up from there, and the writing became more fluid and witty. The interaction between the guy in charge (Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury) and his side-kick was a bit embarrassing because she was so stiff and wooden but the rest of the cast were on pretty good form. I thought Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) was particularly good.

While the film was a good action blockbuster, the bar for such things is moving lower and lower with each Michael Bay film to be released. Maybe I’m just getting too old but how many nearly-invincible beings bashing ten bells out of each other can one watch at a time before the boredom sets in?

It seems Joss Whedon agrees with me — the sequel should be, in his opinion “smaller. More personal”. I suspect they would struggle to make it larger.

In this case the focus is on identity, and what it would take to prove identity in a world where people can move between bodies like software between computers. Most interesting for me is the inclusion of Ken Thompson’s Trusting Trust scenario to the real world — if you can transfer people from body to body how can you be sure that the person at the end is the same person at the start? Extrapolate to the machines which do the transfer, etc.

This was for me the first obvious sign that modern science fiction is written by computer scientists, not just physicists as it was in the old days. (Obviously I mean from the set of scientist authors, excluding Vonnegut etc.) The same goes for biology, though I think this has been true for a while. Genetically-enhanced people is just behind faster-than-light travel as a science fiction “standard”.

• Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol

  A stupid name for a stupid movie. In the first twenty minutes I thought to myself several times, “what am I doing here? this is awful”. Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt, with a backup team including Simon Pegg as the IT-expert/comedy sidekick/bumbling everyman. And I know a lot of people love everything Simon Pegg does but he didn’t write this script, so his role is as crap as the rest of the film. I soon realised that it wasn’t that I was missing the explanations for change of scene from Russia to Dubai to India to wherever they went after that. It was just that they didn’t bother with a sensible explanation. I mean who needs a sensible explanation when you’ve got an excuse to have someone climb up the outside of a glass skyscraper in the middle of a desert?

• Captain America: The First Avenger

  I avoided this when it came out because the trailers made the film look like an extended episode of Ace Rimmer directed by someone who doesn’t understand satire. The film was a million times more nuanced than that, even though it was just a straight-ahead superhero movie. The really cool stuff is how they make the lead actor appear as a sickly weed at the beginning of the movie and the all-American beefcake by the end. The obvious answer is a great deal of post-production trickery, but there’s also interesting stuff about pinning target marks on the guy’s chin so that other actors can address where his eyes will be once he’s been digitally shrunk down! I wouldn’t bother going out of your way for this but I’ve definitely seen worse.

• The Three Musketeers

  An awful pseudo-steampunk adaptation which removes most of the charm and all the menace from the original story. There was no romantic tension and very little in the way of political intrigue. Milla Jovovich jumping about in her underwear makes up for less than you might imagine. Avoid.

• Jane Eyre

  I didn’t even know this adaptation was made — a 2011 version with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, partly funded by the BBC. Obviously there will be arguments over whether it’s done “right” but it personally hit all the points of the book that I liked: the badassery of Jane as a child, the back-and-forth between Jane and Rochester, the weirdness of St John. Top notch.

Initially I hoped this would make the bottleneck between station concourse and platform diminish. The tensabarrier was only ever manned by two people at most, and the commuter trains at about 8am and 6pm have over a hundred passengers. Having nearly a dozen electronic barriers instead should have really increased the throughput.

Sadly my dreams of a slick efficient transfer through the station quickly vanished. Not only are the barriers slow and awkward but most of them are not used. The bottleneck, if anything, is larger.

Using the barriers is particularly inflexible if you’ve got a wide load such as bike or pram. For some reason the barriers refuse to take your ticket into the scanner if there is something just in front of the gate. The natural place to stand with a bike while slotting your ticket into the machine is in exactly the right place so your front wheel breaks a beam and locks down the scanner. So you see a lot of people taking a step backwards and making an ungainly lean in the direction of the ticket scanner.

There must be a reason for this absurd feature but none make sense. It doesn’t prevent the gates opening onto something, since the gates always swing away from the side that accepted the ticket.

I’ll have to look for some branding and see if I can find a user manual for these devices.

Last year we went straight from a Sunday night roda to the Burns supper and generally felt great. Through some freak event I was the only fellow to wear a kilt and so was “volunteered” to give the toast to the lassies.

This year I feel much worse. I am not sure if this is medical problems, the effects of being back on a full dose of medication, work stress, the weather and travel, Helen’s studies or a grand mixtur of them all, but I will not be wearing a kilt this evening.

Out of the three capoeira classes since the beginning of the year I have missed two from injury. I need to feel more alive.

What the fancy panniers don’t do is make it any easier to ride face first into the snow — that was exciting! — or salve my extremely sore bum from my ice slip this morning.

I think I just need to make it a rule that I don’t ride straight out of the station in the morning until the weather improves. That short stretch of road isn’t well used, is twisty, sits on a hill and is in the shadow of the rising sun. A recipe for pain which I would do well to remember.

As if to start, this evening I went to a Glasgow TechMeetup. There are Edinburgh equivalents that I never attended so I don’t know how they compare. The format was:

• beer and pizza at 6.30. Next time I must remember a bottle opener!
• a welcome about 7pm including an introduction from everyone in the room. There must have been about fifty people in the room so it took about half an hour!
• a few minutes to chat amongst ourselves, particularly with anyone who sounded interesting or employable.
• a talk about web design
• a talk about http caching

The first talk was pretty dull and I was ready to call it a day at that point. Thankfully I didn’t cos the second talk was well worth the entry fee, even if it was free. If you bump into serialseb he gives a great talk - funny and informative.

I thought I’d list my currently completed for now, to provide some kind of status update. I’m currently working on Wuthering Heights, which is proving much more enjoyable than I thought it might. Frankenstein on the other hand, which isn’t actually on the list anyway, was really boring and I gave up.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte — Really great, and now The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) makes more sense
4. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee — Not as good as I thought it might be
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
7. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
8. Catch-22, Joseph Heller — Fantastic and endlessly fertile source of cultural references
9. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien — Looking forward to the film!
10. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
11. Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
12. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis — Yeah, I don’t know who compiled this list. This is cheating!
13. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
14. Animal Farm, George Orwell
15. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown — I’m ashamed; but it was awful
16. Lord of the Flies, William Golding — Forced to hate it at school? Yes
17. Atonement, Ian McEwan — Brilliant, and the film’s not bad either
18. Life of Pi, Yann Martel — Don’t bother
19. Dune, Frank Herbert — Weird. For some reason I even read one of the sequels, though I didn’t even particularly enjoy the first book.
20. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
21. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
22. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas — A huge, creeping inexorable powerhouse of a book.
23. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
24. Dracula, Bram Stoker — Great fun and surprisingly creepy at times.
25. Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
26. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
27. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro — Quiet, reserved, evocative and restrained. Emotionally draining too.
28. Charlotte’s Web, EB White
29. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
31. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas — More whimsical than Monte Cristo, and a good sight shorter too!
32. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

Amongst other things, this has turned my thoughts to bike safety when cycling in low light conditions. As Helen pointed out, the first thing to do is investigate the findings of the Evidence-Based Biking community. What is actually effective on the roads in darkness? The Cochrane Library, source of “independent high-quality evidence for health care decision making”, has a survey covering the topic of night-time visibility of pedestrians and cyclists. Sadly if you pin your hopes on the studies available you have to be content when they say “not enough evidence to make a conclusion”.

The one interesting aspect brought up by the review is summed up in this statement from the results summary:

Retroreflective materials enhance recognition, in particular when arranged in a ‘biomotion’ configuration, taking advantage of the motion from a pedestrian’s limbs.

I was very aware that while my bike was reasonably visible (lights, reflectors) my body was not. So actions like signalling were largely invisible, especially in rain where everything is glistening and car windscreens are harder to see through. So it’s odd that high-viz cycling jackets don’t emphasise either the arms or the general human body shape in their design.

I’ve got myself a new rear light just to be on the safe side. But on my searches I came across this extremely cool Tron-light-cycle system which is still in development, which looks like it has great potential to push us from bike lights being “torches strapped to bikes” to something which is designed around the bike itself. I wish the developers luck with their project. And maybe in a few years we’ll all own lights like this…