nalsa

Hm: SGR to end.

This makes me sad. But only a little, because it's not a total throwing-everything-away-and-becoming-a-chicken-farmer thing.

Ok, look. There is always - always - the same guy in the box that the coaches and family sit in at Wimbledon's centre court. The camera never really looks at him, but he's always there. He's been there for years, with his neat little grey goatee and impeccable suit and wide-brimmed hat, and he seems perfectly intent on the tennis. But he can't be everybody's coach, and if he were staff I'd expect him to leave the box as soon as the visitors had been escorted there. All I can think is that he's some sort of ninja-like bodyguard, ready to leap in to protect Andy Murray's mum at the drop of a KGB umbrella. He's been there every year for as long as I can remember.

Who the hell is this guy?

Stuck on a train. Hmph. Due into KX in 50 minutes, instead we're stuck behind a slow moving train on lines that apparently have a "lineside equipment fault", whatever that means, quite a long way north of Peterborough. I'm going to need a pint.

Regular travellers with me may know my total dislike of being cooped up in tin cans with nothing to do. Once I'm out of books (finished one book, trying not to start #2) and fed up of looking at the glorious rolling countryside (fields) (or cloudscapes), it takes a great effort not to run to the front of the train/plane/bus and demand to drive it. Driving, I'm fine. I have plenty to occupy me behind the wheel of a car. Here, inside a box with unopenable windows and braying marketeers trying to out-testosterone each other, I find my already short attention span reducing further. It's somewhat tiresome.

Instead of this I could be at a Marc Ribaud event at the museum. I could be at home with t'missus, a whole library of books to poke at. I could even be tinkering with code (except the wifi on the train is sufficiently flakey for me to give up with that experiment in a flouncy huff), heaven forfend. I could be cooking, or making coffee truffles, or catching up on PVR'd telly.

Once, S and myself conducted a thought experiment, to see just how long I could spend on a plane without wanting to do things which, these days, would get me arrested and banged up on a nondescript island off the coast of Cuba. Two hours forty-five minutes, we ended up with. It could be longer if (i) planes showed decent films that weren't edited to the point of uselessness, and (ii) I was drugged as soon as I was strapped into my seat, put on a drip (to avoid the inevitable dehydration that happens on planes), and kept topped up with whatever was used to put me under. I genuinely think this is something airlines should consider; the risk of terrorists hijacking the plane is reduced, air rage would be reduced, cabin crew would be at less risk of sexual harassment and wouldn't need to keep smiling at the offensive sod in 67D who has been drinking scotch and soda since boarding, and the passengers go to sleep and wake up in a foreign destination. Yes, frequent fliers might develop a drug dependency, and instead of being able to smile in the face of determined opposition crew would need to be qualified anaesthatists, but think of the savings.

Gosh, I'm boring myself now. Time to put the laptop away.

(eta: amusingly, Firefox thinks that I'm in .se, as typing stuff into the search box is returning google.se results. IP geolocation still not working properly, then.)

Ok, I'm back in Teddington (and have been for about 14 hours at time of writing). Now, I'm not one to complain about a free lunch, or breakfast in this case, but when breakfast consists of a paper bag containing (yet another) inedible apple, a bar packed with sugar and artificial fruit (just right for the busy person on the go!), a chocolate muffin that bounces and a smoothie that was bottle-conditioned ^[1], then I'll take the cup of tea and toss the rest in the bin. I didn't want any of this lot, and breakfast isn't something I normally go for, so I don't really care that much.

The fizzy smoothie was slightly disturbing, though.

Waiting for Boots to open is a thoroughly disheartening thing; half an hour, and I can get some Piriton, or other antihistamine for these flaming bites I got walking up the hill on Saturday. There were midges hanging around outside the loos like dodgy blokes in macs, and as I am the tastiest thing known to insectkind I was bitten quite a bit. Not quite as badly as the time I was in Sweden ^[2] but a couple of times. I saw the red blotches, and thought "ah, they're nothing. I'll be right."

Last night I couldn't sleep because of the itching. This morning those small, stealthy red blotches have turned into enormous blistered lumps on my forearms and forehead (and legs), which are driving me nuts, which is why this entry is being composed to take my mind off it. Not working so far, I can tell you. Why am I so tasty to midges, mozzies, and other small bitey insects? Am I just tasty regardless and insects are the only things that can enjoy me? Would, if I ever went on safari, a lion be able to sniff out my tasty meat from a party of 16 fat, juicy American tourists in baseball caps and silly shorts, and go for me first? In the arctic, will polar bears cross melting ice floes to take a chunk out of my buttocks? In the event of zombie velociraptor attack, I'm toast, aren't I? Frankly, at the moment I'm amazed cows and sheep don't come over to give my fingers a friendly nip, just to see whether they'd consider converting from vegetarianism and order some stir-fried Mike in black bean sauce. "But I'm on your side!" I'd cry out, as they evolved sharp teeth specifically designed to break my skin and remove chunks of my flesh as other, less tasty humans stand by and take photographs of the sheep who are vegetarian, apart from when it comes to me.

Ooh, Boots is open in five, now. Cracking. I'd better get down there. Morbidity might be reduced if I get some antihistamines.

1: it had fermented in the bottle. It was fizzing. It tasted alcoholic. I'm pretty sure breakfast smoothies shouldn't be either of those things, and whilst fermented milk might be de rigeur on the steppe or plain, I'm not yet sufficiently dipso to appreciate these things before the morning cuppa.
2: where I came up in huge lumps about an hour after some mozzies got me, couldn't see out of my right eye and S was trying to work out how the hell to get me to hospital when (i) we're in the middle of the countryside, (ii) the road is blocked by a tree that came down the previous evening in a storm, (iii) there's no phone service and (iv) we have no car, and are an hour away from civilisation.

Quick semipublic thanks to myfirstkitchen, jofox15 and Daag WINOLJ for being good sports and agreeing to spending lunchtime applauding my balloon making skillz over beer.

Hypothetically, I could drop a cheapass webcam onto an Arduino-controlled 'bot, which potters around and sends photos from the webcam to a server. Or a phone. Shame the G1 doesn't do USB host-based controlling without voiding the warranty, because the G1 would be the perfect environment for programming an arduino device, lightweight, portable and with decent Open environment principles.

Oh! How about adding a WiFi module to the arduino? Comms over wifi could be bidirectional, too. How difficult would it be?

... ah, very.

Anybody still using Tiger? We are, because we have stroppy X11 packages that don't work on Leopard. Anyway, if you install Security Update 2009-002, X11 will break. Why? Because applications are referencing a package - libexpat.0.dylib - that's been removed! Symlink libexpat.0.dylib to /usr/X11R6/lib/libexpat.dylib and lo! X11 starts working again.

XQuartz has stopped development on X11 for Tiger, too.

Grr.

No shortage of comic book geeks on my FL: Frazer Irving has an exhibit up in Leeds.

Annoyingly it's spread itself over two pages of map points, but this is where maviscruet and myself walked today. 4hrs 35m of which 3h 34m were spent at a non-zero speed, calories used 3331, 14.9km covered, average speed 4.1K/hr, max 11.7. Nice boozer at as close to the midway point as it's possible to get, too.

(I've tried looking at the KML data, and can't seem to find a way of plotting the entire route on one page in gmap. On Google Earth it looks fine and fits, on gmap, no, it needs two pages and I don't know why it's spanning. Suggestions welcome; I've not played enough with gmap enough to know all the little hacks and tricks.)

I knew it.

Ok, well, my episode - I say "my" episode, it's also Pat, Paresh, Marcia and Rosemary's episode too, as well as that bunch from Kent - of Taste The Nation is coming up for broadcast. It is, of course, episode 13, to be broadcast on April 1st (as far as TVGuide.co.uk has it, anyway).

First up, I'm not superstitious, but the thirteenth episode? Come on. Secondly, April 1st? Someone is just rubbing my nose in it now. It's not a joke, I genuinely am on telly on April Fool's Day, cooking stuff I would never normally consider doing (but, despite all that, has actually influenced my cooking style in noticable ways).

Thirdly, I'm not even going to be able to watch it live, because I'm giving a talk on f-stops and shutter speeds at Exposure Leeds that day. 6pm, Old Broadcasting House, come along and point out the flaws in my reasoning, or if you do watch the programme live you can come along and mock my pretentious performance. I have to go straight to OBH from Werk, so won't be able to catch it.

ETA: That's ITV1, 5pm-6pm, Wednesday 1st April. Set your magic recording-boxen.

I have rubbish veins. Still, I thought I was being a wuss complaining about the needle stinging a bit when the nurse pulled it out, and it turns out it's hardly surprising that it was stinging a bit.

The bruise looks more impressive in the flesh, I can tell you.

It isn't just me who thinks that the Daily Mail giving away a Pet Shop Boys album is remarkably hypocritical, is it?

I'M just giving my graphics tablet's hanNHiyM cojmtim syww a Ed- q a Womat .

yeah, that went well . Gt's me momer go.

I'm just giwing M gmphies tablet's handwriting recognition software a ti* q a Worn out.

Looks like I'm not giving up the keyboard anytime soon, then.

Some evenings you just happen to have a bakewell crisis.

So you have a rummage through the cupboard, find all the ingredients (use amaretto instead of almond essence), and make a tray's worth.



Man, they're good. Really good.

One more:



As with all of these; click for bigness.

One of the things I did this week was buy a ring of LEDs from Wilko, with the aim of trying them out as a cheapass ring flash. They're rubbish - too blue, too bleachy, too flat - if the subject is a human, so I thought I'd try uplighting things.





I think that sort-of works quite nicely.

Courtesy of The Bus Slogan generator-o-matic.

Edit: having too much fun with this.