What I have been doing lately

For the first five months or so in my new job I was learning so much stuff all the time that it was utterly exhausting. It made me feel vulnerable but also young in a good way. I had a lull of a month or so and now I'm back to the same thing again. I don't think I have ever had a job where I've had to learn so much all the time, and think so much so consistently. All the jobs I've had as a post-doc have had at their core a sort of glorified data-entry, and any thinking I've done has been either for my own research (when I could find time for it) or very problematic because it involved getting my superiors to see that they were wrong. I'm glad I made this change but it's not what I was expecting. I took it for granted that I would have my exciting M.Sc. year when I got to learn new things, but that that would be my last chance to do thinking-learning for a long time (perhaps until I do a theology degree when I retire). Of course I realised I'd have to learn lots of new things in a job but I thought it would be along the lines of learning new procedures or software packages, like learning to use Powerpoint -- something you learn without thinking. Instead I'm learning things like Design Patterns, which are pure logic, and very hard. I assumed that I'd get good at my job eventually and then it would be boring, but it looks like maybe there will always be new things to understand because there will always be bright people out there coming up with new programming languages based on a particular logical insight, or new frameworks which handle particular problems through doing something unexpected and very clever. I find this wierd to think of. And I feel a bit like a sixth-former again, when I was doing two Maths A-levels and regularly coping with things right at the outermost stretch of my understanding.

The other thing I've done in recent years which has been right at the outermost stretch of my understanding is my edition of the Anglo-Saxon Charters of Wilton Abbey. My original plan was to give myself a year to settle into this job and then pick that up again and finish it off -- I still have the introduction to write, which will be fun, and all the indices of things like Greek loan-words to produce, which will be very hard. I do really want to finish that book. I feel mildly apprehensive about whether I have the brain capacity for both.

So, anyway, I still feel like I'm in the middle of a massive transition in my life, when I had expected that by now I'd feel like the transition was largely made. This job is not what I expected -- I think it's better, but I still feel a little disconcerted. I'm so glad I changed directions: to be honest I am a little bit in love with the idea of myself as someone who can be part of both worlds. If I'd gone the Computer Science route as a teenager (for a while I was certain that I was going to go into Artificial Intelligence and make neural networks) I wonder if I would have spent the last year doing an M.Phil. in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic? And marvelling at my new-found permission to think broadly (and cynically) about things pertaining to humans? I hope I would have.

Tie-tie

I went to my first hackathon this weekend. It was quite interesting. I was going to blog about it but I'm exhausted. Instead here's the one-minute version of that Daft Punk song:

Go Daft Punk! I think listening to this on repeat for a few hours might revive me enough to get off the sofa and microwave some lasagne.

Zurich

I met up with some friends in Zurich over the weekend. In some spare time before the others arrived I went to see the Grossmünster, where Zwingli got his Protestant on only a few years after Luther. It reminded me of a regret I have that in my time at Corpus Christi, which has an annual sermon to commemorate an otherwise forgotten John Mere, I never once managed to get off this joke (pause for effect): "Mere Commemoration? Sounds positively Zwinglian!" (pause for laughter)*

Zurich is remarkably expensive. There are no Starbucks in Rome and my friend who lives in Rome holds that this is a bad thing, so we went into one of the many Starbucks in Zurich to get her a chai latte. I got a small Americano, e.g. just a shot of espresso with some hot water, and it cost nearly four British pounds. Also a small bottle of water at the airport cost £3.75, but that was after security, when all bets are off.

Zurich feels rather small for such a well-known city. It is well provided with waterfowl, and also with large placards to help you identify said waterfowl. The shops all close on Sundays, which is a blow if you were planning to pop into a Coop before you leave and spend all your spare francs on ChocoFresh. I was addicted to ChocoFresh when I lived in Italy.


Luckily my friend from Rome brought me some proper Italian biscuits, which I have been sharing around at work. In a bit of a blow to my career as a Java programmer I found out today that the official rules for doing Java documentation include "Avoid Latin". Admittedly they seem to think that "a.k.a." is Latin, but they specifically say you can't use "viz.". It reminded me of a friend who was trying to force his email to auto-generate Subject lines for replies which started "anent:" instead of "re:". Anent is a good English word while re is not only Latin but from the fifth declension, the worst of all the declensions. He never managed it, and frankly it wasn't likely that he would, since he is a musicologist with little interest in computing. Now I am more connected to computing things maybe I should try to bring his dream to life.

* It's a joke about trans-substantation, and you should admire it like you would admire a dog walking on its hind legs -- "it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all".

Things I have learnt recently

1. If you want to start a conversation with the other programmers at your workplace, leave a Game of Thrones DVD box set visible on your desk.*

2. But when you put said box set into your bag and see it nestling next to the fifth volume of Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms you will feel slightly dirty. I can just imagine what Augustine would have to say about sexposition.

3. Augustine doesn't half talk about belching a lot. It reminds me of a thing my brother told me about how he and my sister-in-law went to a place in South America which had a religion that was sort of half Catholic and half-pre-Catholic, and they believed that burping was spiritual so they drank a lot of coca-cola before services, and then sat around burping in front of big pictures of saints.

4. They're going to "sunset" Google Reader. Now I'll have to use something slick with pictures in it. Boo! At least some things last:


5. Joss Whedon had made a film of Much Ado About Nothing with Nathan Fillion. Nathan Fillion!

To be honest, the trailer doesn't make it look great. But it's got Nathan Fillion in it! And the whole of the cast of Dollhouse, it looks like. And Nathan Fillion!

6. Here is a comic about how you can do anything you want in life. Go you!

* By the way, everybody thinks that the books were better. I have a theory that programmers read more novels than academics do...

So it's another internet post then

I keep having thoughts I want to blog but they involve complicated things and I'd have to think hard to explain what I mean and not be totally incomprehensible as usual. Instead I am going to post some things I got off of the internet.

Here's an interesting thing about internet currencies. (I work with someone who is one of the programmers on bitcoin.) I think there's a huge difference between in-game purchases of hats, however unusual those might be, and bitcoin, which can be exchanged for other monies. Tuvalu is a place which should have been invented by Neal Stephenson.

I was trying to explain to someone the other day that the internet has made a huge difference to my usage of exclamation marks -- I used to recoil from them with upturned lip but now I find myself using them quite often, and I have a sense that that has become OK. The person I was talking to didn't have a clue what I was on about. But it's not just me, and here a properly articulate person talks about it.

Apparently Computer Science equals Facebook for Dummies.

The bloody BBC wants DRM in HTML5. For goodness' sake!

Men and women are quite similar apparently.

Titles

In 2010 I was annoyed with First Great Western for not having a simple "Dr" option on their website registration, but "Dr (Male)" and "Dr (Female)". I chose the "Other" option as an ineffectual sort of protest. Now I get emails from them starting "Dear Other Rebecca Rushforth". I quite like this. At the same time as freeing me from the crushing expectations of being The Rebecca Rushforth it also suggests that I'm a bit alternative, like one of those sitcoms (Arrested Development, Peep Show, etc) which get low ratings because only interesting people like them.

There used to be a Rebecca Rushforth who played teenage league tennis in America. Now there's a Rebecca Rushforth who is Professor of Ballroom Dancing at William and Mary College, Williamsburg, Virginia. Rate My Professors has her down as "hot". Comments include: "Fantastic class! Professor Rushforth is incredibly easy going and a fantastic dancer!" I think it's quite likely that she's The Rebecca Rushforth, and she seems like she's making a good job of it.

I'm rather less fond of Virgin Media's habit of sending me emails starting "Dear null". It's hard not to feel a bit dismissed by this. But I did just phone them up to sort out a bill and a polite man in India constantly referred to me as Doctor, as in "Now, doctor, can you confirm your email address", or "please wait, doctor, while I transfer you to my colleague". I did like that. I don't go by "Doctor" in my work life. People don't seem to on the whole -- there are quite a lot of people with doctorates around, not just in the science areas, and everyone's very cool about it.

People being cool about PhDs is such a nice contrast to my previous life. It may well be that at some point I get all misty-eyed about academia, but at the moment I find that almost impossible to imagine. I used to quite like the PHD webcomic, but now when it pops up in my RSS feed I love it, because it reminds me of what I've escaped. Also LinkedIn keeps asking me if I know people whose work I used to find it hard to take seriously, and with whom I had to have dull earnest conversations at conferences -- pretending that I don't gives me a beautiful feeling of release. This probably counts as the zeal of the convert. But long may it last!

Some more things

Neil Gaiman has long claimed that Tasmania is wonderful. I just got this email from a friend:

Instead of having wall-labels, MONA, The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, gives visitors a mini-iPad with interactive features. The icon for more in-depth info about an artwork is a cock and balls with the caption "Artwank".

He found out about it from this blogpost by David Byrne of a visit to the place. It does sound pretty cool.

The American Storycorps project is very excellent. I think I've posted about it before. It's a huge oral history collection, and sometimes they animate interesting recordings. This one about one of the astronauts who was on board the Challenger when it crashed went somewhere I wasn't quite expecting. It's very good.


Also not quite what you think it's going to be, and very much worth watching, is this:

I think it's from an old British clips show. Are those the dulcet tones of Denis Norden?

Plus there's another video by that excellent dancer: