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That was a really good day; great hymns at the service, the gorgeous gardens of Selwyn, supper at Gardie's which I'd managed never to visit in however-many years around Cambridge, and the chance to dance with a vast multitude of pretty girls at the ceilidh afterwards.

( More photos under the cut )

The great advantage of the dandelion, as far as its removal from a garden is concerned, is its habit of marking its location with a large orange flower, whereupon you have a week to remove it before it seeds.

I'm not sure how borage spreads, but the leaves are unmistakable and the flowers of a blue as garish as the orange of the dandelion; on the other hand, there's less urgency in the removal, and more disincentive since it's covered with stinging hairs.

Bindweed, however, seems to be a weed for which the term 'extirpate' is perfect; I imagine Victorian household manuals telling of the danger in being too parsimonious with the arsenic, or in allowing the mercury with which you cauterise the roots to drop below a red heat.

On a more cheerful and less destructive note, the vigorous strimming of the garden by the landlord's workmen has not destroyed the bluebells, which are starting to rear up again.

Kittens.

They're very fluffy.

They gambol in a tranquil fashion.

They will relax my brain.

Which is in sore need of being relaxed, since today I was collected at 10am by a Man with a Van to collect all my possessions from Cheltenham. We got in the van, and proceeded down to just before Royston. At which point a car from VOSA pulled in in front of us with a 'FOLLOW ME' sign flashing, and led us into a layby (http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=535375&y=242250&z=3&sv=535375,242250&st=4&ar=Y), whereupon a VOSAn declared that the van was leaking diesel to the extent that it was unfit to travel on Her Majesty's highway.

This was apparently due to loose nuts on the fuel-lines; Andy the driver had no suitable spanner, but fortunately this was a layby into which many commercial vehicles had been pulled (generally on account of inadequate tires), and some of them had spanners in the boot. After half an hour, I phoned home and asked Dad to collect me; twenty minutes after that Andy claimed to have fixed the van, ten minutes after *that* Dad appeared, and I said that I wanted to continue to Cheltenham with Andy in the hope of getting this all over and done with. Twenty minutes after that, documentation stating that the van was only so broken as to be unfit to travel on HM's highway from next Tuesday appeared.

Unfortunately, while tightening the fuel lines with a variety of spanners of not quite the right size, Andy had managed to break the brake line, and the now-brakeless van was once again declared unroadworthy.

I walked into Royston, caught the train back to Cambridge, had a sandwich at an expensive station cafe, and caught a taxi into work. It was at least a healthier way of wasting a half-day of holiday than the traditional one of waiting for a man not to deliver a television.

Trying again Friday. Hoping my bad karma for the week has been used up. Contemplating the Buddha of Tranquillity.

I know Stars in my Pockets ... is the first half of an unfinished duology; is it a sane second Delaney to read, after Triton long ago?

The first half of the Peter F Hamilton I have on (DRMed) disc, but the e-publisher hasn't released the second half in that format.

Several people pointed out even at the con that you can read award shortlists much more cheaply, in shoulder-strain and wallet-ache and waste of bookcase alike, if you wait a year ... but having obtained this pile, where should I start?

Here is a program for solving puzzles of a type that someone was doing at pizza on Monday, where a puzzle-setter has drawn some black squares in a grid, and labelled some of the squares in the grid with the number of neighbours (including themselves) that are black.

It's in Common Lisp, which I'm playing with on the principle of learning at least one new programming language per place of employment. It's probably dreadfully badly written; the algorithm it uses isn't guaranteed always to work, but probably works on all problems set on the assumption that they'll be solved by humans.

There seem to be lots of these grid-based puzzles appearing at the moment, in the wake of sudoku; I tend to look at them, write a program to solve them, and then discard the problem as thereafter uninteresting; Dad does sudoku at the breakfast-table most mornings. Sudoku's somehow become the standard of comparison for unprofitable intellectual effort - a genius friend of mine described philosophy (in which he had a fellowship at All Souls - as I said, genius) as more-advanced sudoku shortly before starting to retrain as a lawyer.

http://maps.google.com/?t=k&ll=-23.50733,-68.373413&spn=0.242104,0.322037

Up in the Chilean altiplano, this is presumably some sort of mining facility; it looks a bit better on Google Earth but I'm not sure how to link to it there.

The bottom blue square is a mile and a half on a side. As to the purpose of the straight lines etched across the desert, search me.

http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/multiwavelength_astronomy/multiwavelength_museum/

Some pretty pictures, and really rather good didactic commentary.

Also, to do for geography what Jane Austin and the Flying Moose of Nargothrond do for literary criticism, consider the following map

http://img378.imageshack.us/img378/2464/bob2fe.png

I am precisely ninety years younger than Esperanto, was born twenty years to the day after the assassination of dictator Armas of Guatemala, and sixty-nine years younger than the organisation which became the FBI.

I share my birthday with George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Kevin Spacey and Sandra Bullock; the Earl of Rochester who appeared in The Libertine died 297 years before I was born, and Eva Peron's death preceded my birth by precisely a quarter-century.

If I want to listen to well-done classical music in Cambridge, I can look out for adverts announcing bits of the standard repertoire to be performed by various people in West Road, in college chapels, or (if the 'various people' are thoroughly famous) the Arts or the Corn Exchange.

In non-classical music, I don't see so much of a standard repertoire: I don't understand the way that random local performers encode what kind of a thing they are. I have a couple of sets of fairly pronounced tastes - I like well-produced undisguised pop, Spice Girls and Steps and Aqua. I like lyrics-driven pieces, fairly regardless of genre - Tom Lehrer, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, I suppose some bits of Franz Ferdinand; I prefer the funnier of The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. I like Oysterband a great deal, from the mixture of ceilidh bouncy enthusiasm with politicised lyrics; the Levellers a bit less, Billy Bragg on politics much more than Billy Bragg on people, same for Bob Dylan. Bounciness is probably the unifying feature there, and would explain why I'm pretty keen on everything on the Best of Pete Waterman double album. Politics isn't necessary, I like Meatloaf and quite a lot of other Eighties rock, but it helps - very fond of Laibach's NATO.

Most rap I'm actively unkeen on; I picked up the new Kate Bush album and it did nothing for me. Most soul strikes me as wallpaper, there was nothing on the recent Goldfrapp that particularly stuck. Straightforward 'how I love him' solo-singer hasn't appealed when I've listened to it; whilst I like some of the recordings of absolute jazz standards, I've not enjoyed much live jazz.

So, what should I be listening to, and when are they next performing at the Corn Exchange, the Junction, or some smaller and more accessible Cambridge venue?

This month, I have

Fallen asleep in a production of Prokofiev'sRomeo and Juliet by the Russian State Ballet Company of Siberia.
Remained awake for a CUMS concert featuring Shostakovitch's Festive Overture and the Rite of Spring performed by an orchestra with two contrabassoons.
Fallen asleep in a production of Howell's insufferably tedious Requiem
Remained awake for Rossini's Petite Messe Solonelle in the second half of the same concert
Fallen asleep while one of my colleagues was presenting interesting research to an audience of four people including the owner of the company
Remained awake and rapt for a production of Tosca this evening

I think I may be a dormouse; in other news, there's an awful lot of music around in Cambridge.

After a remarkably purposeless Saturday, I spent the morning gardening; initially raking the lawn, then going over and over it to remove fallen leaves by hand. The flowerbeds were also thickly covered with fallen leaves, and the surface of the soil seems pretty compacted.

I couldn't help thinking that biology lessons at school suggested that fallen leaves ought swiftly to be devoured by worms; at which point I noticed that I'd been closely examining the garden for an hour and had seen only one worm.

Many Internet sites will sell me worms: is simply adding a pound of worms uniformly distributed across the garden likely to help, or would it merely cause a brief plague of ecstatic thrushes? Having convinced my parents to put kitchen waste in the green bin provided by the council, I'm wondering whether a wormery mightn't be a sensible way to go ... excess of compost is the kind of problem a gardener loves to have.

Or is it simply that a cold March is not a time suitable for worms, and they're far underground ready to re-emerge in May and clear the beds of leaves overnight?

Today I also discovered that the stems of ivy go a lovely shade of pink with delicate palest-yellow buds when they're growing in the dark behind weatherboarding; reminiscent of what I've read about forced rhubarb.

[Edit: looking at wigglywigglers.co.uk suggests that there's something uniquely uncompostable about walnut leaves, which could be a problem since the garden's overhung by a large walnut tree. In some sense that's the root of all our garden troubles; the walnuts attract the squirrels, which have dug up and devoured the bulbs we put in last autumn]

In the middle of a Libyan desert, coloured like Mars and with sand-dunes looking like the cartoons of a mad fluid dynamicist, we find

this.

My guess is that it's either a gas well or an extraction head for the Great Underground River project, but it's a beautifully alien region.

There are two ways of making flapjacks, the healthy way which produces a large slab of oats lightly contaminated with toffee, and the less healthy way which produces a large slab of toffee lightly contaminated with oats.

Commercial flapjacks tend to be of the first kind; moreover they make the toffee with margarine. I made two batches for

beckyc's party yesterday, one of each kind; they were much-appreciated, the toffier ones even more so than the others.

It was a good party, preceded by a walk around Wimpole with Becky and Owen in what was thankfully snow rather than rain: we watched X-files and Xena, listened to the Wombles, and MBM juggled flashing balls and rolled a crystal ball around his hand in an entertainingly show-off kind of a way. Becky made creme brulee to demonstrate her new blowtorch, Alison made baked alaska, and the room became companionably full.

I'm not religious, but beneath the inordinate appetite for chocolate puddings I hide some vague kind of ascetic tendencies; I give things up for Lent.

This year, it was coffee - I'm not habitually fuelled through the day by gallons of the stuff, but I was getting through a couple of cups a day, and felt this was maybe excessive. I've the great good fortune of liking hot water (provided the temperature is right; 1:20 in the microwave for a small cup, 2:00 for a large one; lukewarm water is obviously no fun), so switched to that: I possibly do get through a couple of litres a day, I chain-drink at times, but with hot water this is a less culpable habit than many.

This evening I went to see Syriana at the Arts Picturehouse with Mum; a popular film, we got seats B2 and B3 and so got to see George Clooney's failed redemption and Jeffrey Wright's slow corruption in glorious trapeziumovision. Also, it being what one does at the Arts, I unthinkingly had a latte beforehand. It was a good latte, which I'm sure says something about expected blood levels and receptor desaturation.

That was four hours ago. I still can't get to sleep, I've that feeling that I used to get after deliberate over-consumption before an all-nighter, where my eyelids itch slightly and would much rather be open than my brain would have them closed.

In other news, work's pretty good: small company, smart and friendly colleagues, working IT, interesting problems to handle, and it gets me out of the house. And on Monday I get to give them my P45 form and bank details, so that at the end of the month they'll pay me.

NASA has cancelled Dawn, an ion-drive-propelled probe intended to visit two large asteroids.

A large portion of the spacecraft, including the two cameras provided by European organisations, has already been built - it was intended to launch in June. The budget was about 300 million Euros, much of which (though presumably not the launch vehicle) has already been spent. It would fit easily on an Ariane 5 - indeed, it's too small for it to make sense to launch it on such a vehicle; I can't quite tell whether it would fit on a Soyuz.

There's no competing ESA mission; so the question is, could NASA be convinced to let the mission be taken over by ESA, and could ESA be convinced to pay for it?

Going to Brussels from Cambridge by bus and plane, rather than by train, for the sake of a small monetary saving was completely daft; Brussels airport is well outside the city, and it took 9:15->6pm to get there and 10:30->5pm to get back. If I'm going to travel nine hours, I at least want to be the other side of the Alps or the Atlantic; if I'd taken the train, I'd have had time to see more of Brussels than the Grand Place and the tram route to the university where the conference was held.

FOSDEM 2006 was a gathering of free-software developers plus enormous numbers of hangers-on, in which number I count myself. Google was there, in small force handing out migraine-inducing polychrome flashing badges, but no other interesting-sounding employers; besides, I have a job now which I didn't when I planned my trip.

There were some interesting talks: Jon Haslam from Sun showing off DTrace, a not-very-free-software tool which lets you do amazing inspection of the details of running systems to watch the weird interactions and ask very directly where all your performance is going, an interesting-looking Gnome video editor. Jeff Waugh from Canonical talked about what Ubuntu was trying to do, but in absurdly broad terms, and taking the relevance of Free Software to the convention-of-human-rights Freedoms as read. The Grand Place in Brussels has some spectacular fret-work in stone. I was a bit surprised to realise that, in this country where everyone would understand you in either French or German, I gravitated to German.

But there was a general feeling that this was an excuse for a huge number of geeks to go and drink beer in Brussels. Brussels beer is undoubtedly good; I got through a fair amount of the temptingly cherry-flavoured Kriek. But there was an immense feeling of undirectedness; there's that traditional maxim that a nerd is a geek with a purpose, and there were many fewer nerds there than I'd have hoped for. Throughout the conference, I had St Peter's admonition to Tomlinson in my ears:

"By the worth of the body that once ye had,
give answer -- what ha' ye done?"

I have demonstrated that I still know roughly how to handle a car, driving round Bottisham, and to Coldham's Lane Sainsbury's, and to Grandma in Histon, and to Scottsdale out in the wilds of Trumpington beyond Waitrose. My parents survived the experience.

I have seen The Libertine, a film whose producers clearly got a really good deal on prop mud on condition that they never displayed a saturated colour throughout the piece; Johnny Depp self-destructed as the Earl of Rochester, and it was never quite clear either what heights he was falling from, or why he'd chosen to fall.

I've made a nice Saturday lunch, with roast chicken on a bed of shallots and peppers accompanied by baby turnips, for my parents and my Nottingham friend Louisa, who has decided that academia's not for her and is starting to embrace her inner actuary.

I have watched the single most excrucitating Special Fan-Service Episode of Xena ever; there was a shark in the episode before, and clearly feeding it with the wounded and swimming around it is near enough jumping for these purposes;

beckyc has fed me mashed potato with grilled cheese on top.

I have planted two hebes in different shades of purple, a euphorbia, thirty-six grape hyacinths and four short rows of specially bulbous easi-grow carrots.

And I have a job, a Real Job with an employment contract and not a fruit-fly in sight, starting Wednesday week. I'll probably buy new computer bits to celebrate.

and a contract once the cheque's in the bank - but I have finished writing the fruit-fly distorter; should be presenting it to the customer tomorrow or Friday.

I have bought plane tickets to Belgium (the train was no quicker and cost rather more), and booked a place in a central-Brussels youth hostel for FOSDEM 2006 the weekend after next.

This Friday evening I go to see The Libertine with

mobbsy,

beckyc and all; tomorrow, my cousin is coming to visit.

These should give you some idea of the exciting tenor of my days; and until I find myself another contract, I won't even have the joy that writing 1200 lines of computational geometry and image processing code in Java and ImageJ Macro Language, neither of which I could write a fortnight ago, plus three pages of descriptive prose has brought to me this last fortnight.

On the other hand, if you have any fruit fly embryos you want orthogonalised ...

Current Mood: bouncy

Is somebody else's research topic, but last Tuesday Dad and I served her as driver and photographer around five large Norfolk churches.

( Here be icons )

Saturday morning and Sunday evening got me a reasonable way along the path to effective fruit-fly orthogonalisation; I suspect I may be using the wrong sort of model for the regions involved, but I've a Cunning Plan to fix that which will still use most of what I wrote today. Tomorrow I need to figure out the interfaces to ImageJ so that I can work with real images; I'm currently displaying everything as large square blocks of characters, in best BBC Micro style.

After Saturday lunch, a lovely walk up on the Magog Heath and Wandlebury, with

ewx,

beckyc,

naath,

hsenag,

stephdiary and

sonicdrift; then to Becky's for tea and cakes, red wine, more cakes brought by

mobbsy, episodes of Xena, Haribo (macht Kinder fröh, und Erwachsene ebenso!), pasta, more red wine, more Xena, port, even more Xena, and back home before I fell over.

Sunday morning and lunchtime occupied with a walk round the back of Anglesey Abbey, along disused railway lines and past an exceptionally playful free-range hound. Sunday evening, dinner with Mum and Dad of pheasant casserole followed by apple crumble.

It's not Friday, and I'm not an American political blogger, but this sign on a Kuala Lumpur recycling bin seemed too good not to share:

Current Mood: orthogonal

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Tom Womack

Recent Entries

Sally and Matthew Get Married

Gardens

Assiduously contemplating kittens

A dealer's room is a dangerous place

Wasting time in yet another programming language

Another in the series of Very Strange Places

Multi-wavelength astronomy fun

A slave to memes

Music (post-1900)

Culture; glirine tendencies

De mysteriis vermibus

Now, what are you?

On flapjacks

Powerful stuff, these plant alkaloids

How does one lobby ESA?

Annoyingly mediocre long weekend

Tom's exciting weekend

Praise wine when it is drunk, ice when it is crossed, ...

Medieval stained glass in Norfolk

Very civilised weekend