Aquarionics

Okay, take a painting.

It’s wonderful, a masterpiece. Every item has it’s perspective just right, the shading is perfect, and things that are misted are lightly fogged out. You don’t get details, but then, you don’t need details. It’s a beautiful painting.

The one beside it is the same, but better.

The third is just as beautiful as the first two, but occasionally the shading is a little off.

The forth makes up for the shading with wonderous colours, gorgeous shading, and generally being wonderful.

The fifth picture is like the first two, except where once there was fine watercolours, light fogging of the things you don’t need, and smudges of colour, someone is outlining every item in thick black marker pen.

And that is my opinion of the fifth series of The West Wing. So far.

Recovered from cold.

Will start back on actual content in November.

10 entries in a month not good.

Full sentances also not good.

Recreated version of The Divine Comedy’s track “The Booklovers” as filked to 80’s kids TV shows.

The BodLovers

I have a cold.

This is my excuse, and it’s a good excuse. Me having a cold has three main effects on my life, and they are these:

One: It means the amount of tea I drink is the same, but the level of sugar goes up, and is occasionally supplimented by lemon_juice+honey+ginger+boiling_water. Also, my working environment is given a festive air as slowly drifts of used tissues build up and occasionally avalanche into other things.

Hang on, that was a second thing, wasn’t it? Okay, four main effects on my life.

The second, um, third, effect is a general inability to do anything, assisted by an increase in feeling sorry for myself.

Forth. Sod, There are five effects on my life.

Forth: Voice. My voice loses an octave. My voice does not have a surfit of octaves as it is, and so this tends to cause people to feel vaguely uncomfortable when I’m speaking to them…

Three: Butterfly.

I suffer from a condition known as “Butterfly Syndrome”. It’s a distinct ability to/curse of leaping from topic to topic without touching them for very long. Usually this happens mid-paragraph, but a cold shrinks my attention span to the point where I will frequently forget a sentance before I’ve reached the middle of it, and gone onto the sentance three steps down.

So I’ve gone from writing about quitting weblogging three steps down to the point where I make a sheepish return, without it ever appearing on the server. I’ve gone from the long tale about the death of reef, my main server, to having rebuilt it and composed two posts on the subject, though you never saw them.

So rest assured, I am journaling, It’s just that the entries aren’t escaping the bounds of my – quite literally – fevered imagination.

When Mr Amery of Cambridge announced that he would shortly be celebrating his score and sixth birthday with a party of special magificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. When this was to be coupled with the birthdays of Matthew & Sally, as well as them – plus Sarah, it proved the cue. Not for a song, but for a party.

I was invited to this party, obviously. I mean, I could be writing what will probably be a long and over-referenced report of an event I wasn’t invited to and its surrounding events, but there are few things duller than a long description of a party you didn’t go to.

Ahem

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well. It was a bright and crystal clear afternoon, and the wind whiped around Reading, for it is Reading where our tale begins. (There are few places where you will encounter both Tolkien and Bulwer Lytton references within a few paragraphs of each other. Welcome to Aquarionics, home of the badly matched crossover. See? I’m six paragraphs into the report, and I haven’t left the house yet).

I left the house. I was late. This was something of a shock, considering I’d been very carefully planning to leave myself time. I failed to do so. Within five minutes of leaving, I discovered that my MP3 player (Which is a USB Pen Drive that happens to play MP3s, which means all you have to do to install it is to have an OS that does USB Mass Storage. Which is, in fact, Windows 95 R2 upwards. You don’t have to bugger around with DRM software, or things that try to replace your MP3 playing and encoding software, or stuff that doesn’t work on Linux. It’s Great) didn’t like the MP3s that were on it, so I couldn’t listen to the CD I’d just bought and encoded (Which had the newest Anti-Music-fan idea of installing new drivers for your CD player automatically when you put the CD in the drive. Luckily, I held down shift, which disables autorun.)

An hour later I was in London, discovering that the Underground was well and truely screwed today. So I went into central London and back out again in order to go from North-West of Central London to North-East. So, two hours later, I was in Cambridge.

It may not have escaped your notice, long term readers, but I like Cambridge quite a bit. I still want to move back there, and this weekend hasn’t helped in dealing with the fact it’s fairly unlikely to happen for a while.

So, Train station to Bus station. Discovered that the bus that would take me to Rivendell (The name of the new house) was a Citi 6. The Cambridge Citi buses are great, every twenty minutes between 8:00 and 5:30, and after that when they feel like it. I took a taxi.

“This is Cambridge Road” said my taxi driver, as he stopped. “Just let me out here, then” I said, foolishly.
He did.

He drove off.

This was not Cambridge Road.

This was Girton Road.

Girton Road would, at some point a few hundred feet away, turn into Cambridge Road, but from my viewpoint I couldn’t see this, so I asked at a shop. When we navigated though enough english that we both understood, I discovered that not only was I not on Cambridge Road, but when I got there, I was at the wrong end. So I went hiking.

Found Party. Good Party. Good Beer, Good people, New Games, Fridge Poetry, People I don’t see often enough, people I’d like to see again & other party stuff. Oh, and biscuits. Rivendell is absolutely gorgous, as is – when I left the next morning – Girton. Wanna move back…

Next morning was given tea and breakfast, and then hiked for an hour into Cambridge, where I had lunch and met Rosemary to lend books and chat, then buggered off home.

Where I discovered, something to my suprise, that there was a problem, and that the 100 gig hard-drive in the server had died.

Bother.

On the front page of Aquarionics is a brand new thing, which is – co-incidentally – also a thing we’ve had since launch in January 2000. It’s gone though various code revisions, various new versions, and various rethinks. This doesn’t mark it as differant from the rest of the site, merely part of it.

It’s called “Mostly” where once it was “This week I have mostly been…” and it’s current version is merely a reading list. It started off as just a list of things I was doing (Listening to Divine Comedy, Reading Cryptonomicon, Playing The Sims), evolved into using Amazon’s Associate scheme so that you could see more details about the item – and even buy it, and then into a JavaScript thing that sent you to differant amazon.* sites depending on which you chose. Now, it’s linked into the Amazon Web Services API (code, and mostly() in the library) to give you prices in dollars, yen, pounds and euros as well as the latest editions. The main difference as far as admin is concerned is that instead of having to find the Amazon ASIN number for each country for each item, I now just give it “author:’foo’ title:’bar’” and an Amazon department to look at.

But this isn’t special. Amazon Light has been going for over a year now based on the web services stuff, I can’t help but feel I’m spending all this time playing catchup to people like Mark and Sam and wishing I had time to play with all this cool stuff, or to specialise in something. For any thing I can do, I know at least three people who can do it better, faster, or more elegantly. I need to do something new. Then I might be invited to things like Foo Camp :-)