Generation X

As you may recall from earlier postings, I recently read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. I've managed to find Generation X, one of his earlier works, and started reading it:

I like it already. It has these little Urban Dictionary-style definitions as footnotes. One I especially like is:

Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behaviour.

Mmmm. Wonder how often I've seen that. Now I have a name for it. Here's a few more:

Power Mist: The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

Recurving: Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.

As in art, so in life, or maybe the other way around.

Thief of Thieves

I'm currently on a comic-free diet, for financial reasons, but I am seriously tempted by this from Image Comics:

There's a decent review of the first issue here. It also reminds me of a short lived TV series from FX called "Thief".

Codes and Ciphers - ADFGVX

I was in W.H. Smiths in Chemsford and I noticed one of these collection series things. Y'know, build a scale model of H.M.S. Victory in 3,000 weekly parts, that kind of thing. This is a book series published through the Times newspaper called "Everything is Mathematical". This week, the subject is one close to my heart: codes and ciphers.

I've written earlier about ciphers and there's rather a good one which illustrates the main principals of most ciphers, both manual and electronic. It's called the ADFGVX cipher and was invented by the Germans during WW1. First you create a grid of letters, 6 * 6, with the letters ADFGVX representing the rows and columns:

		A	D	F	G	V	X
	A	Z	T	N	L	5	F
	D	E	4	K	M	S	Y
	F	X	R	9	J	3	D
	G	C	2	I	8	Q	W
	V	V	P	7	H	1	B
	X	A	0	G	6	O	U

Each letter or number is then represented by a letter pair, row/column. For example, the message "Send 3 and 4 pence" would come out as "AV DA AF FF FV XA AF FX DD VD DA AF GA DA". This is the substitution part of the cipher. To further strengthen the cipher, a transposition was then used to shuffle the letters around. You have a key word with unique letter, say ANDREW, and lay out the message letters in a grid (padded out to 30 characters):

A N D R E W A V D A A F F F F V X A A F F X D D V D D A A F G A D A F F

A D E N R W A D A V A F F F X F V A A F D F X D V D A D A F G D F A A F

Then re-arrange the columns in alphabetical order. This gives you six five letter "words", "AFAVG DFFDD AXDAF VFFDA AVXAA FADFF".

The cipher was eventually broken by the French army and contributed to the final successful Allied offensive on the Western Front in 1918.

Scratch from MIT

MIT have made this little programming IDE called Scratch which is very similar to the Android AppInventor I blogged about last year:

It's main use is education, but it's also used for simple games programming and animation.

Robot Earthworms!!

Like some kind of science fiction thing, I spotted this through the Make site:



Bizzare!

Sunday Board Games Club: Talisman!!

Yes, folks, at long last I got to play my beloved Talisman.

It was an enthusiastic, if raucous, group: we were asked to be quiet at one point and we even had an audience to see what all the fuss was about. As we progressed we added one player, making six, and lost two, at which point it sped up but we were playing at a cracking pace anyway and it didn't seem to matter. One guy said that it was the fastest he'd ever played the game.

I heartily recommend Talisman for newbies as it's a really simple game to learn and play: you roll a dice and move that many places on the board and you follow the instructions written on the place you land. It's that easy.

Saturday: The Royal Gunpowder Mills

My father came down this weekend for a wedding on Friday, so today we went to the Royal Gunpowder Mills near Waltham Abbey. They used to make gunpowder there until the 1890's and then made cordite:

It was a research establishment after the war and now, after a lengthy decontamination, it's a museum. Making explosives was a dangerous business and the museum details the accidents and precautions taken by the workers and in the construction of the buildings:

It is also very interactive with demonstrations for children big and small:

(what happens when you add Mintoes to a big bottle of Cola?).

It'a also got a very large display of guns and rockets:

It was a good day out and worth the trip.

Torchlight II - Out at Last!!!

After months of waiting, Torchlight II has finally been release. Yay!!!!



Update: Yeah, pretty good. They've been smart enough not to screw around with a successful formula, so playing is familiar. I like the idea that you can play female characters as well as male. As an example, here's my current character, a level 5 berserker:

Obviously appealing to the burgeoning women's market. Jolly good show, chaps!

Budgies

My sister asked me for pictures of the budgies, so here's the two of them sat on the cage:

Oliver, the male on the left, is standing on one leg, which usually means he feels happy and secure enough to do so, and, clearly, Snowflake, the female, is also happy. Plus she's not beating him up. Once I was watching Oliver in the cage. He wasn't doing anything in particular, just being content and at one with the Universe. Snowflake went up to him and knocked him off the perch. No reason as I could see. Maybe he was too happy, she was feeling a bit frustrated and wanted to take it out on him?

Jolt Awards

The software equivalent of the Booker prize is called the Jolt Awards, given by Dr. Dobbs, an old programming magazine, and this year one of the finalists was a book I bought about six months ago, Running Lean:

which is about how to run a start-up successfully.

Another one of the finalists was this, which also seems interesting:

Tuesday: Oxfam and Calexico

While at the shop on Tuesday, an unusual music donation was handed in:

It's a baby violin! When a mummy violin and a daddy violin love each other very much...

John also showed me one of our latest acquisitions.

It's a first edition! Nice and £50 to the discerning collector.

I only did a short shift at the shop as I went into London to see Calexico in concert at the HMV Forum in Kentish Town. It was a good set, with classic tunes and some stuff from the new album, Algiers. This is from an old album, Feast of Wire. Outstanding!

College Monday: Dev C++

Today I started my education in earnest with a class on software development. To teach us this, Bromley has decided to use C, which is the basis of quite a number of development languages. It's a fairly safe bet as C has been around since the early 1970's, taking off with the introduction of Microsoft's Visual C++, which, for a while, was the only way to make serious windows software.

We're using a package called Dev C++, which has an IDE written in (wait for it) Delphi 6. I kid you not. Wherever you go, there you are.

We've yet to get really into it: we've spent the lesson going over data types and functions are next month, so no rush then. I thought I'd show keeness by asking the lecturer if there were any exercises for us to do. He was mildly impressed.

FTL

While updating on the status of Torchlight II on Steam (yawn) I chanced across a new game called FTL (Faster Than Light), which seemed quite entertaining.



It's got itself a review on Wired interviewing the creators. Cheap too.

Saturday: Maps of the Future, Surfing the Sixth Wave

Today I went to a lecture at Birbeck College, UCL, on long term technological changes, run by the London Futurists.

The first half of the lecture consisted of a short description of how futurists work and produce results, which was fascinating. They tend to work on four axes; political, economic, social and technological.

The second half of the lecture consisted of examining the idea that there will be a "golden age" of new technology starting in 2030 based around a scarcity of resources. These will be food, energy and water, mostly caused by increasing urbanisation, changes in climate and growth in population. The technologies are things like recycling, energy efficiency, energy storage (batteries in particular), and alternative energy sources.

One of the more interesting ideas was illustrated by the following:



Technology adoption/prevalence/success follows a certain path. The Crisis of Maturity in this case was the .Com bubble bursting in the early 2000's. The maturity phase is more a case of roll-out, what Gibson alluded to when he said that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed".

All-in-all it was a great lecture which didn't seem like the two hours it was.

Oxfam Friday: Paris, Texas and So I Married an Axe Murderer

I managed to get the top deck today (yay!) and had a look through the soundtracks for some decent tunes. Normally this is old show tunes and the like, but I picked out two that I rather liked. The first was from Paris, Texas, a film by Wim Wenders starring Harry Dean Stanton, Natasha Kinski and Dean Stockwell:



It's not a half-bad film, if a little slight. A man comes out of nowhere after years of being missing and tries to re-enter his life and find his wife and son.

The other was a Mike Myers film called So I Married an Axe Murderer. It's an amiable hit-and-miss comedy, but it has some funny beat poetry:



One of the tracks on the album was the La's There She Goes, which is about as good an Friday afternoon's song as it gets:

Oxfam Thursday: Venus in Furs

I pulled a double shift at the shop today and was on the bottom deck throughout. Not much trade, but under the desk was the novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the word masochism is derived. Whoever left it there was obviously very naughty and will be punished severely at some point, if he's very lucky. It does give me the excuse to show the track of the same name by the Velvet Underground:



Which is what Southend is like on a Saturday night. Venus in Furs depicts the sexual and emotional domination of a man by a woman. Sacher-Masoch was a utopian and an advocate of what we now call gender equality. The novel ends with the moral:

"That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work."

In real life, Sacher-Masoch had a contract with his then mistress, Fanny Pistor (I'm not making this up; that was her name) which stipulated that she "promises to wear fur as often as practical and especially when being cruel". This contract was for six months, so he couldn't do much else as he was all tied up for that time.

Fun Fact: Sacher-Masoch is Marianne Faithful's great-great uncle on her mother's side.

I didn't get chance to play any music, but Lee on the upstairs till managed to dig out a sixties album which seemed to consist of Rolling Stones tracks, including this one:



If you want to pout, ladies, this is how you do it!

I also managed to get a pristine copy of the Penguin hardback publication of You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming. The Bond Girl in the novel is called Kissy Suzuki; I kid you not.

We've also had donated a lot of Folio Society books. These are re-prints of existing popular books in a distinctive, high quality format.

Catfish

Sometime last year, I watched a film called Catfish:



It's about a sort of Facebook scam. The protagonists are deceived into thinking a little girl is an art prodigy, whereas in fact, it was her mother. No money was taken, just a bit of pride lost.

It's interesting to note that the woman wasn't particularly bright or well educated, unlike the three men who made the movie. She was just simply amoral enough to take advantage of someone who wanted to believe something was true when it wasn't. The moral being we can all be deceived no matter how sophisticated or intelligent we are, probably more so.

The title of the film is taken from an anecdote related at the end, by the woman's husband, about cod being exported from Alaska to China. They found that the quality of the fish, which were kept alive, degraded over the time of the journey and were almost inedible. After some trial and error, they realised that putting in a catfish with the cod kept them active (catfish and cod compete for food) and the quality of the meat was maintained. The analogy was implied that some people are human catfish: they take advantage of other people to keep them on their toes (almost "inoculating" them, if you like) so that they do not get taken advantage of in the future.

Skyfall

The London Movie Meetup Group is meeting to watch the new Bond movie Skyfall on Saturday, 27th October at the Vue cinema, Islington, with optional socialising afterwards.

As an aside, here's some young people having fun running about:

Oxfam Tuesday: Annette, Midlake and Ironclad

I didn't know whether to go in to the shop today as Mark had seemed in two minds when I spoke to him last. I phoned this morning but he wasn't in, so I spoke to Debbie. She said that they were a bit short handed and best to turn up just in case.

I turned up, had my lunch and was assigned the top till (yay!) so I played music all afternoon. I managed to play Midlake's Young Bride:



And I met Annette, who I hadn't seen in about four years! She was polishing some gardening books (which is very Annette!) I didn't get much chance to say anything other than hello, but it was nice to see her hale and hearty.

I also bought Ironclad from the shop, which looks a little over the top. It portrays the siege of Rochester castle in 1215 by King John and even has the destruction of the south-east tower by mining:



There seems to be lots of "fettling", a word used by my Uncle Alan to describe brutal combat. Seems an appropriate medieval word!

Geek Girl & 3D Printing

One of the things I noticed at the Brighton Mini-Maker Faire was the number of women involved. In the past, they tend to have been middle-aged women on the craft side of things (representatives of the WA, I suppose), but this year I noticed that they are bright young things doing electronics, computing and 3D printing! (One phrase guaranteed to get my notice: "There's some young women over there doing 3D printing").

There are also a number of web sites dedicated to what might be termed the Geek Girl phenomenon, notably GeekGirlCon (a geek girl convention in Seattle, Washington State, U.S.A, but most active on Facebook) and The Mary Sue, sort of geek gossip for girls. I noticed this article on there: 17-Year-Old Girl Invents Cellphone Heart Test For Patients In Developing Countries, which is something you'd expect a team of scientists from Oxford or Harvard Medical School to be working on, not a 17-year old student. I like the way she kept going even when she was failing: I think after a few weeks I'd have given up.

There's also a convention in London for 3D printing, the 3D Printshow in October. Make magazine have also been running a 3D printing weekend and have a slideshow presentation of day 1 and day 2. This is an example of what can be made:

It's called a Nautilus gear, but whether it's practical or just for display I don't know. Impressive anyway.

Last Shop Standing

I've just spotted this:



Working in a charity record shop, I wonder how much these have contributed to the decline, or enhanced it's popularity?

Sunday Board Games Club: Android!

Today, I played what must be the slowest game I've ever played. The game was Android, by Fantasy Flight Games:

The background is that of a murder in New Angeles investigated over a two week period, six days per week. Each turn takes one day and our game had five players, the maximum.

Timo, a Berliner, is the owner and game master (and rule encyclopedia) and had really lavished attention on the game, using cellophane sheaths (called card sleeves or deck protectors) on all the cards, putting little paper bands around the decks of cards and then putting the decks in their own plastic boxes. He'd also put all the counters in compartmentalised boxes, and put the character specific cards together in their own boxes with the right counters so they didn't all get mixed up. I'd like to say that this was unnecessary with Android, but it was necessary and made the game much easier to set up. I'd never seen the point in having deck protectors before, but I'm a convert now.

Each player gets a character as detective and I got to play Floyd 2X3A7C, a bioroid (biological android: the replicants from Blade Runner). One of the advantages my character had was that I got an extra unit of time on top of the standard six.

Android is not a bad game but it's just really slow. To get to the end of turn four took us three hours! This is an average of 45 minutes per turn, or 40 if you have a 20 minute set up, which was at least what it took. The last time I was in a game this slow, there were eight players. I estimated that we would take until about eight o'clock to finish the game, so I called it quits at two o'clock. Maybe if we'd been more experienced or there were only four players it would have gone faster?

Brighton Mini-Maker Faire 2012

I went down to Brighton for the second time this year to look at the Mini-maker Faire, especially the 3D printing!!

Give me an E, Bob! (and a P)

The National Museum of Computing also had a display:

Nostalgia! There was also some art stuff:

As well as the ususal soldering and crafting workshops. A jolly nice day out!

Oxfam Friday: Boiling Angry!!!

Boiling angry?? Me??!?!?

Well, yeah, a bit. Here's how it happened.

I wasn't due in at the shop today as I had another engagement, but I said to Mark that I could do up until 2:30PM and no later. "Great!", said he, and we agreed to me turning up at 12:30PM to cover for a few hours. When I got there, I looked upstairs and saw Mark on the upstairs till instead of Simon. Where the hell was Simon!!

Here's him making a big deal of doing the morning rather than the afternoon shift as he didn't want to work the same shift as Judith and now he doesn't even turn up! So, yeah, I was more than a little narked with the big, ginger lump (sorry Matt).

All this was more than compensated by being on the top deck for about an hour or so to play some nice tunes. I managed to find a rather original video of Darkstar's Dear Heartbeat. For those of a scholarly turn, this is a fine example of counterpoint.



After a few hours in Chelmsford, I went to Shoeburyness to look at the sea:

Notice how blue the sea was, and that's no Photoshopping! I also managed to get a picture of the wind farm on the Eastern horizon.

This is part of the London Array, the largest offshore wind farm in Britain (and we have about 15!)

Update: It has occurred to me that Simon might have had a epileptic episode, which he's prone to, and forgot to tell us he couldn't come in, so forgive me for the outburst.

Budgie Freak-out

When I was making coffee in the kitchen this morning, there was a lot of fluttering in the living room. Everything was curtained, so I expected the budgies to be all quiet, but there was a big commotion in the cage.

Snowflake (the female on the left) was on a swing, but Oliver was clinging onto the bars near the bottom, eyes white. Who freaked out who I don't know, but Oliver was the most freaked out of the two. He freaked out again while I opened the curtains and uncovered them, but seemed okay when I put them in the kitchen.

With me being all weird on Wednesday and the budgies freaking out today, maybe the flat's haunted!!

Oxfam Thursday: Andrew and Caribou

An uneventful afternoon in the shop. Mark had asked me to swap with Tuesday and I did downstairs. I also got to see Andrew, who I hadn't seen since I came back, so it was good to catch up. He also does for the Sudbury shop, which is in Suffolk. He's a pleasant chap, if a little vague, and spent time pricing History books, which I helped him with. It was a bit of normality after the weirdness of yesterday, although there were customers to deal with, so "normal" was relative.

No music, so I thought I'd leave you with Caribou:

Wednesday: Odd with a capital "O"

What a strange day!

It began strange, though. I awoke at about 4:30. The block was completely silent, with only the muffled roar of the occasional car on the bypass to break it. No noise in the flat itself. No noise (the rattle of pots in the sink, for example) from next door to explain why I had been woken up. It was dark with no dawn approaching, so it wasn't that. Sometimes I have woken shivering, but it wasn't cold enough for that: cool but not cold. I've also awoken cocooned in bedclothes, with a vague fear that I'm suffocating, but the sheets were to one side. All very baffling.

I tried to get back to sleep for about an hour or so and finally admitted defeat, got up and made myself a cup of coffee, by which time dawn had arrived.

Throughout the day, I had a strange feeling that I had forgotten something really important, but couldn't figure out what it was. Because of this, I had a very edgy day.

I thought it best to get out of the flat and away from the Internet and the computer. I took the train down to Southend Central, had a cup of coffee at Cafe Nero, and walked from Southend to Shoeburyness.


View Larger Map

I took a few photos along the way. This is the old Palace Hotel with the new pier lift:

Very space age.

The view along the shore towards Thorpe Bay. This was about an hour into the walk and by then my legs were feeling a bit heavy but not much else.

By the time I got to the seafront at Shoeburyness, I was very fatigued, practically everything from the waist down ached in some way (yes, even those). I sat down for a while on a bench and watched a pair of windsurfers:

Eventually, I got on a train for London and headed back.

I got back to the flat eventually and collapsed on the bed. I didn't feel tired, just exhausted physically, and lay quietly for half-an-hour or so until I could get up without it being a drama.

All in all, a very odd day indeed, without any particular reason why. The reason I've blogged what is otherwise an unremarkable day is to show that it's not all good times at chez Lemon.

Midori

I've been looking at a new web browser called Midori:

I saw a review of web browsers in this months issue of Linux User & Developer and it scored pretty high, given that it was up against FireFox and Chromium (Google's fully open version of Chrome). Everything seems to use WebKit these days and Midori is no exception. It's not a bad little browser and reasonably fast too. I noticed that it looks to web sites like you're using Safari on a Macintosh, so if you want to cover your tracks... I wonder if there's a Firefox add-in which changes what your browser tells web sites?

Sinbad

I've been watching Sinbad:



It's not a bad little series.

Sunday: The Quantum Workshop

I went to a public science event in London today. It's called The Quantum Workshop:

It seemed to consist of shining lasers at pieces of dust or ash in a vacuum.

I think the idea was to demonstrate that photons have mass as well as energy: hit something with enough light and you can cause it to move as per Newtons third law of motion. A laser is an awful lot of light in one small space, the ash is light enough, and gravity isn't that strong, so you can levitate the ash particle.

As an aside, I noticed that there were a number of quite attractive young women attending the stand, whether deliberately selected for this or not I couldn't say. Remember, this is theoretical physics, so maybe this is the Cox effect in action, attracting bright young things to an otherwise unattractive (for women) field.

I went for some lunch near Tate Modern and noticed how the Shard now dominates the sky line:

Oxfam Saturday: Stop Thief!

Actually, the thief was asked to leave before he got anywhere near anything valuable. Mark put on his sternest I'm-taking-no-shit look (which can be incredibly intimidating) and told the tea-leaf, who's well known, that he wasn't welcome. This is the first time I've seen anyone asked to leave the shop for any reason, so I knew it was bad.

The second thing was that I managed to be up on the top deck all afternoon and play music. To do this, I had to get the drop on Tom, who's like Simon's evil, slightly (but only just) smarter, twin brother, except they don't really look much like each other apart from being big. He was skulking around in the basement when I bumped into him, to avoid having to replace Mark who was on the bottom till. When we both got to the ground floor, I gestured to the downstairs till and said "all yours, mate" and skipped lightly up the stairs to the top till. A victory for the common man, I say, and a defeat for idle skulkers everywhere!

I played Stanley Odd, a rapper from Scotland. This is one of his more mellow tunes and, although not as good a rendition as the album, the lyrics are straight from the heart:



I played some Paavoharju (a Finnish psych-folk band), but they don't have any decent videos. Kevätrumpu is one of my favourite tracks, but no dice. I thought I'd have a Sigur Rós video of the track Rembihnútur instead, both beautiful and sublime. It's from the Valtari Mystery Film Experiment which goes along with the album of the same name:



As my Mother would say, where there's no sense, there's no feeling, and vice versa. Got something in your eye there, mate?