Protest and Survive, Part 2 - The Big March

Today was the day of the big anti-austerity march in London. I'd agreed to meet up with the delightful Mr. Glitz and his fiance Toni, but saying something is always easier than doing something. Not only were there scheduled maintenance works for the District line between Upminster and Barking, but C2C had joined in as well. This meant that I had to catch the train to Grays via Ockenden and then catch the Rainham loop train into Fenchurch Street. K.T. texted me to ask where I was and I texted back my situation and impressed upon him not to wait. Luckily, he was with others on the march.

I finally got onto the Embankment between Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridge and walked towards the front, keeping my eyes peeled. It was a HUGE march with thousands of union members, public sector and others.

Everyone was there, mostly Unison (Britain's biggest)

and Unite, but also FBU (Fire Brigade Union),

Prospect (professional engineers, managers, etc.), BFAWU (food preparation and retail), USDAW (shop workers), CWU (communications),

NUT, NASUWT and UCU (teachers and University lecturers), as well as ASLEF, TSSA and RMT, representing the transport industry. Even Equity turned up. There were also "representative associations" there as well, unions in all but name, such as the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives.

And no union march would be complete without a brass band:

My eye was caught by some colourful banners:

and some large carnival-style balloons:

But it was a little girl and her home-made placard which seemed to capture the spirit of the occasion:

Say it like it is, kid.

I finally caught up with K.T. and Toni in Hyde Park, but the day had exhausted me (I'm getting unfit now I'm in the car all the time), plus I had promised to meet some friends for a birthday drink that afternoon, so I didn't tarry long.

As a coda, my friends in the pub talked about the demo. One said that he would be more than willing to accept cuts in public services. The other asked, "Even the Fire Brigade?". "Yes," he said. "Even if it meant your house burning down with you in it because there's not enough firemen?", the other persisted. He hesitated a little and then said "Yep, even then!" Some people are just that stubborn!

Protest and Survive - The Peasants are Revolting!

Tomorrow there will be a demonstration in London that I will be attending. This is the anti-austerity demonstration organised by the TUC against the cuts in public spending which will impact on the most vulnerable members of our society. Obviously some people don't agree with the aims of the protest, and that's fine, because the cuts probably don't affect them anyway. It doesn't really affect me either, but the reason I'm joining the protest is that I'm heartily sick of the idea that when times are tough the people who are affected the worst are the people on the bottom rung. Why them all the time? Why not people on the top rung? It's not as if they can't afford it nor will they miss the money.

Power to the People!

Support Your Local Sheriff!

I got one of those voting cards the other day, the ones that tell you it's time to vote in the local or general elections and where your polling station is. I was a bit baffled as the local elections were about a year or so ago, and the general one's not for ages.

It's to vote for the Police and Crime Commissioner of Essex. Seriously! Check out the web site.

If it was James Garner and Jack Elam, I'd vote for 'em.



Update: Nah, it's just some kind of oversight/public liason thing. Still, a vote's a vote!

C Test - Part 2

...and I got 49.5.

Out of 52, which makes it 95.something percent, the highest mark I've ever got for anything, ever! So the SCJP wasn't a complete waste of time.

As an aside, the Pragmatic Programmer has been published, after a few years in eBook development hell:

A minor classic, I'm currently enjoying reading it.

Squeeze - Take Me I'm Yours

A thousand lifetimes ago, when I was in the sixth-form at school, we had a record player (for those under 30, that's a combined turntable and amplifier). We had one 7" single for the whole school, and this was Squeeze's "Take me I'm Yours", the words we knew by heart. (I think it was broken by one of the girls who got sick of us singing it).



A couple of years later, I bought the album "Singles 45 and Under", and discovered the scope of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford's abilities and genius. They wrote good pop songs about real life. I've always liked "Cool for Cats" especially.



(In amongst some naughty bits of Kenny Everett: we used to dress just like that back then!!)

The BBC have done a documentary on the band and what a jolly wheeze it is too, full of the old favourites, although you can tell they weren't as much fun after Jools left.

The Laws of Software Design

The technical publishers O'Reilly had a special offer on digital books this week, so I indulged and bought one of the cheaper ones, Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander.

It's actually a book on the importance of software design and in it he defines the Laws of Software Design as follows:

1. The Law of Purpose: The purpose of software is to help people.
2. The Law of Change: The longer your program exists, the more probable it is that any piece of it will have to change.
3. The Law of Defect Probability: The chance of introducing a defect into your program is proportional to the size of the changes you make to it.
4. The Law of Simplicity: The ease of maintenance of any piece of software is proportional to the simplicity of its individual pieces.
5. The Law of Testing: The degree to which you know how your software behaves is the degree to which you have accurately tested it.

There's also a nice little formula which he calls The Equation of Software Design. This is:

D =	(Vn + Vf)
	———————
	(Ei + Em)

Where:

D	The desirability of the change;
Vn	The current value of the change to be implemented;
Vf	The value of the change in the future;
Ei	The cost (effort) to implement the change;
Em	The maintenance cost of the change (future effort).

(The formula has changed on his web site).

Now I admit that this is all a bit pseudo-scientific. The idea that there are actual laws in software development, what you can and cannot do, has always been a bit ludicrous. There are known good practises and I think this is what he really means by Laws, but an important factor that seems to be missing is the human one (software, like Soylent Green, is people) but the book seems to have it's heart in the right place and is worth a read if only to see how much you disagree with him.

Nevada Smith

It's not often I come across a Steve McQueen film that I haven't seen, but I saw one called Nevada Smith the other day while channel hopping:



Seeking revenge for the murder of his parents, Max Sand tracks the killers down, finally confronting the last, played by Karl Malden, before sparing him and riding away.

It's not a bad film, although calling it a classic is a bit strong, but it has a fine supporting cast and McQueen was a good enough actor to show how Sand/Smith ages throughout the film.

C Test

I have my first assessment test today on the C programming language. ("You're wearing a nice pair of brown trousers, Mr Lemon!!").

Also, the K&R book, The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, is available next month from Pearson in eBook formats. A classic!

Oooo, here's a little puzzle for those of you who are C/C++/C#/Java developers. What's the output of the following:

int x = 10;
int y = 10;

printf("The value of x is %d and x++ is %d\n", x, x++);
printf("but the value of y is %d and ++y is %d\n", y, ++y);

Update: Got bowled a few fast ones but managed to field them quite well (I think!)

The Three Musketeers

Last night, while playing FTL, which I've become mildly addicted to as a distraction from Torchlight 2, I sort of half-watched The Three Musketeers, which was released to no fanfare at all last year.



It's about as far away from the Dumas classic as you can get, a bit Baron Münchhausen really, but everyone seems to be having a great time, and it's worth watching as an instant on LoveFilm, as I did. The bad reviews slag it as not being what Dumas intended, but I think he would have loved it! This was the time of Jules Verne and writers were not as snobby as they seem to be now: if he could have got away with having airships in his books, he would have done it. A not half-bad pizza movie.

Hurricane Fish - 25th Anniversary

Was it really that long ago?

I remember the night itself pretty vividly. I was awoken about 2-ish to a loud banging sound coming from the bathroom. The window latch, which was only a thin strip of metal, had sheered and the window was flapping about. Amazingly, the window hadn't shattered and I managed to seal the whole thing down with insulation tape. The other windows in the flat were all slide windows and so were unaffected. The only other thing about that night was the sound coming from the stairwell. The wind was howling and it was the most disturbing thing I'd ever heard, a keening, moaning sound no human or animal voice could ever make.

The morning after, I tried to cycle into work, but there was devastation all over. One grove of trees (which still show the marks to this day) had the top sheered off as if by a giant's hand.

To Live and Die in L.A. and Mo' Better Blues

Using my subscription to LoveFilm, I watched two movies starring John Turturro.

The first was To Live and Die in L.A., all about a counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe) and the two Secret Service agents (William Petersen, from CSI, and John Pankow) trying to catch him.



Boy has it aged. Very much an 80's film, a bit over-long, and the music is teeth-wateringly embarrassing. It has a magnificent, over the top car chase, driving the wrong way down the freeway.



The second film is Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee film with some really cool jazz.



Trumpet player Bleek (Denzel Washington) has to sort out his complicated life and his band, including saxophone player Shadow Hendersen (Wesley Snipes. That's right, Wesley Snipes plays a saxophone player!). It's not a bad film, mellow. Like the jazz!

Codes and Ciphers - Playfair

While looking at something else, I was reminded of a cipher invented by Charles Wheatstone called Playfair. It works on pairs of letters, again using a letter grid. Taking the grid we had before:

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

We then take a message and split it into two letter groups, so "Send 3 and 4 pence" comes out as "SE ND 3A ND 4P EN CE". If you then look up the letter pairs in the grid, they form the corners of a rectangle. "ND" form a rectangle with "F9" (same row order). "SE" are on the same line, so you select whatever is to the right, in this case "Y4". Similarly, "4P" are in the same column, so we select the next row down, "R0". Continue and we end up with "Y4 F9 XO F9 R0 KZ VX". The letters are wrapped, so "WC" comes out as "C2". Double letters, like "PP" have the second letter as "X", so "PX" comes out as "VR". This makes the decryption look a bit odd, but if you know "X" stands for the duplicate, it's obvious. You're unlikely to get "XX". Have a go at this:

M1

6Z

N8

QA

4H

0X

4Z

VM

4Z

U0

YO

EJ

4X

Y3

UE

LP

UA

0X

L4

03

MZ

A1

MZ

EU

F9

S6

X4

Z4

4H

4X

0Z

XC

30

A6

B8

7K

3Y

3U

M1

GE

4Z

VM

XU

JT

7K

U7

FW

35

LY

UE

GZ

3Y

6Y

S4

34

ZM

OE

MV

0Z

V6

ZJ

50

53

16

24

UX

0Z

XC

(I've padded some lines out to even letters with an "X")

The advantage of this over other, simpler, substitution ciphers is that the normal frequency analysis (counting the amount of times a letter occurs) doesn't work as well as there are 36*35 letter pairs, rather than just 36. A weakness is that pairs can be the reverse: "BR" comes out as "PD", but "RB" comes out as "DP", a property which can be exploited by a cryptanalyst who knows that this cipher is being used.

Playfair wasn't particularly secure, but then it wasn't meant to be. It had to last just long enough for the information to be effective: by the time the enemy had broken the code, it was already too late! For this reason, it's sometimes known as a tactical cipher.

Tom and Dick

'Tis the season to be ill. I managed to survive most of the week, but in the end it got to me too.

As an antidote, here's a video of lots of young people running about and having fun:

Sugru Repairs

I've been doing some small repairs using Sugru, a small pack of which I bought a while back. It's a bit easier to use than normal epoxy.

I used an old modelling trick of re-inforcing the join with a piece of paper-clip wire, drilling out the holes with a small 1.0mm drill bit in a pin vice. Not a perfect repair, but not bad, so we'll see if it holds.

Update: Nah, not solid enough. Back to the old green stuff!

Arduino at Maker Faire New York

For those interested in electronics, gadgets and the whole Maker movement, Massimo Banzi, one of the people behind the Arduino microcontroller, gave a speech at the big Maker Faire in New York:



I have an Arduino somewhere and have programmed it, just to switch led's on and off, but it's a very powerful platform. I don't know much about the latest changes, but they seem to have created a version based on the 32-bit ARM chip, developed back in the 80's for the BBC Model B and now used in a lot of mobile phones, giving a significant boost in power and functionality. This may be as a reaction to the release of Raspberry Pi, which is a similar system and also uses the ARM chip. You can get all-in-one Arduino kits from the Maker Shed.

Colonel Redl

A strange film. The original Colonel Redl was head of Austro-Hungarian military counter-intelligence just before WWI. He was eventually uncovered as a Russian spy, having sold virtually every secret worth having to them.



The film has him as a victim of the politics of a corrupt regime and society. It's not a particularly bad movie, if a little laboured. Klaus Maria Brandauer is good, though, as is the hauntingly beautiful Gudrun Landgrebe as his femme fatal Katalin.

Daniel Craig on Saturday Night Live

Apparently, Daniel Craig was hosting Saturday Night Live, the famous comedy sketch show over in the U.S. yesterday, no doubt as part of promoting Skyfall.

Got some good reviews too. Maybe they needed a bouncer?

As a contrast, here's one of my favourite pieces of dialog from The Bourne Identity:

Oxfam Saturday

An uneventful day in the shop. I was downstairs throughout the afternoon after Mark had asked me to do a turn. He wanted me to cover the 2 - 5 slot downstairs as well as assisting one of the teenagers, Jasmin ("a bit vague", said Mark). She was just as he described, in the way that teenagers are; learning to be charming; slightly catty, in an offhand way, about one of her schoolmates who turned up unexpectedly.

She reminded me about a scene in the film Nikita, both in the French and American version. As part of her assassins training, the protagonist is being taught manners and deportment by an older woman, Amanda, played by Jeanne Moreau in the French version and Anne Bancroft in the American, both class actresses. Amanada says that she must learn to do or say something when faced with an extraordinary situation, to put people at their ease. In the French version this is to smile sweetly, in the American to say, "I never did mind about the little things".

The delightful Jesse, who witnessed my handling of a difficult customer a few months ago, was upstairs playing Meatloaf. Not my choice, but still:



Mark has put her forward for the Deputy Managers job at Brentwood, which she's more than capable of doing, but Anne, his boss, also has a candidate, so it's all to play for.

MIT's Media Lab

The current U.K. edition of Wired is a special dedicated to MIT's Media Lab:

I remember having a look at their site a few years back and it seemed a bit weird and far fetched, but incredibly interesting and they've had quite a few successes, electronic ink being the one that springs to mind. They're a sort of technical version of the Bauhaus.

In The Mood For Love

Outside my comfort zone again, I watched In The Mood For Love, a Cantonese movie starting Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, on LoveFilm:



Two people gradually fall in love, united by the fact that their spouses are having an affair.

It's more than a little slow, a bit disjointed, and it is in Cantonese: you feel like shouting, "For God's sake, man. Kiss the WOMAN!!!" On the plus side, Maggie Cheung is one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the screen and makes buying cooked noodles look positively erotic. And the dresses! My God, she must have worn about 50!!

Typography

At college yesterday, we did web design. As part of this, our lecturer showed us Google Web Fonts, which, for me, is facinating. Google has a huge collection of free fonts which can be used with your web site. It's used in the same way as CSS, extending it.

I've been facinated by fonts since I was young when my Father brought home a Letraset catalogue from work. There's even been a film made of Helvetica, one of the most common, modern, sans-serif fonts:

ELO

I happened to be switching channels the other day when I saw Clare Grogan (of Altered Images and Gregory's Girl) interviewing Jeff Lynne and they showed this delightful video:



It even looks like him.

Cheer up, mate. It's the start of the weekend tomorrow!

College Wednesday - Faith in Software

On the course this afternoon, one of my colleagues, a Senegalese chap called Eric, said that he had faith in his software. I couldn't resist:

"Code as if ye had faith and code will be given to ye", I declared. "It is the Holy Software of St. John the Programmer", and, "Take up thy code and work, said Jesus".

But lets face it, lads, how often have you thought, "Thank God that works!". Often enough.

Dredd in 3D - A Review

Yes, folks, at long last I got to see Judge Dredd, and in 3D to boot.



Well it almost wasn't. For about twenty minutes or so, the projector malfunctioned and we just got everything out of focus. Someone at the back went out to complain and, after a blackout, it came back on with everything working.

I was impressed. The 3D experience was pretty good (it really was 3D!) and Judge Dredd is good movie to see it in. Initially, I was a bit disappointed to see how low tech it was, but after that, the film turned out to be a treat. Karl Urban is 10,000,000 times a better Dredd than Stallone ever was and Olivia Thirby was pitch perfect as Judge Andersen. The plot was workman-like, with lots of bangs and crashes, and the slo-mo effect of the drug scenes worked very well in 3D. The only thing the original movie did better was Armand Assante chewing the scenery. Lena Headey was okay as Ma-Ma, but lacked a little menace for my taste, plus Dredd throwing a woman out of a 200 storey window wasn't exactly PC.

All in all, a good pizza movie, and I got some 3D glasses! Yay!

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?