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:

Some internet things

I keep intending to write long, meaningful posts about the world and things, but my brain is stuck on Java and how I can't get Eclipse Juno to work. Even if that were interesting I don't have enough articulacy to write about it properly -- I can barely explain my problems to my co-workers. So instead here are some random internet things interspersed with a few small thoughts I had.

1. I love xkcd. There's an xkcd for everything. Here is a very good one which puts really well something I wittered on about incomprehensibly in a previous blog post (see item 2).

2. Watch this super-excellent video, made by a recent commander of the space station on her last day there! It's really very good and strange. There is no up or down! If I were a teacher I'd get my class to watch it.

3. I think this is going to be the year of rereading. I've been unpacking boxes of books which I packed up in 2007. They are full of goodies! I am currently rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which is very excellent. I'm also rereading Gaiman's Sandman books.

4. I find Gays of South London entertaining enough. (Devon is somewhat heteronormative.)

5. One of the things I'm going to post about at some point is weather. I spent last week learning about it. I know why it's snowing! And I can now identify different types of cloud. I know what an occluded front is, and why Britain is so warm (for its latitude). There are tons of really good things about this on the Met Office website.

Reading in 2012

I've kept track of my reading for 2012 like I did for 2011. I read fewer books this year than last (though I wouldn't be far off if I counted unabridged audiobooks). Also of course I haven't counted titles like "Artifical Intelligence: a Modern Approach" or "Head-First Design Patterns". Here are the statistics:

• Total number of books read: 174
• Gender of authors of each book: 91 male, 78 female (the rest are anthologies)
• Fiction vs non-fiction: 136 to 38
• Number of re-reads: only 15
• Number read on Kindle: 100 (57.47%)

It's not been quite such an interesting reading year as last year was. I think this is because so much of my energy has gone into the very tough course and the challenge of moving down to Devon and starting a new job in a completely new industry. I haven't taken so many reading risks, so I haven't had so many nice surprises. But there were a few books I enjoyed more than I had expected: Jerzy Pilch's The Mighty Angel, about a Russian drinker who falls in love, and Vanessa Gebbie's The Coward's Tale, about a Welsh mining village haunted by a terrible mine accident, are both more interesting than they sound from synopses. Pat McIntosh's series of murder mysteries set in fifteenth-century Glasgow is very good, as is Nicola Shulman's Graven with Diamonds, a biography of Thomas Wyatt. Lytton Strachey can really write, and is more interesting than he has any right to be, and Iain Pears is reliably great.

I read some mid twentieth-century stuff which I enjoyed, fiction in the form of Anthony Powell's surprisingly easy-to-read A Dance to the Music of Time, and non-fiction in the form of Nella Last's War and Call the Midwife, both of which took my breath away.

But leaving aside rereads, my favourite books of the year were, in reverse order:

• Austin Wright, Tony and Susan, reviewed here
• Craig Taylor, Londoners, reviewed here.
• Tom Lubbock, 50 Great Paintings, reviewed here.
• Muriel Spark, A Far Cry From Kensington. I seem not to have reviewed this yet. It's about a young fat widow called Mrs Hawkins who lives in a genteel boarding house in Kensington. She works in publishing, and the story mostly follows what comes from her designation of a hack called Hector Bartlett as a "pisseur de copie". This is a seriously brilliant book, and has to be one of the standing classics of the twentieth century.

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas, anyone who might be reading this. It's wierd how intensely Christmas forms its own traditions. In the last few years we've developed one in my family where my mother and I argue about the content of the midnight mass sermon. It was a pretty inane one last night. But heigh ho, that's not really the point. For once I found myself able to let go of that and enjoy being at that service with a group of people whose actions (if not their words) I admire. It's a Christmas miracle!

About a fortnight ago the people who sometimes graze their sheep on one of my parents' fields turned up at our front door with a carrier bag with half a lamb in it. So for Christmas dinner we had a big leg of lamb. It was very delicious. I don't know how far away it had to go to be killed, but it spent its life within a couple of hundred yards from where I am sitting now.

My mother gave me a device for forcing a hard-boiled egg into a cube shape. I feel quite good about this. I gave my grandma a book about her home city of Bath in the Blitz, with pictures from the time next to pictures of the same places now. Bath's blitz was short but intense. My grandma was a young woman at the time, working for the Ministry of Defence. She told me that she remembered her little niece Jenny, who was four or five years old, saying "You won't let them kill me will you aunty?". (We talked to the same Jenny, a self-assured old-aged-pensioner now, after lunch.) I hadn't known that one of my grandma's second cousins was killed together with her small child. I'm not entirely sure now whether the book was a good present. My grandma clearly finds it very interesting, but are the memories it's bringing back still painful? It's hard to tell. I find it interesting to hear about it, myself. I wished I had asked my grandpa before he died -- he was down in Plymouth at this point, which was far more badly hit, and he didn't move up to Bath and meet my grandma until 1943.

Money and value

I have just had a royalty statement, and my Margaret book has earned £42.62 in royalties! I never thought that it would ever pay off the advance, which, although small in relative terms, seemed rather generous to me. So now I am an author who has not lost a publisher money! And I have £42.62 more than I did before. This is the sort of money which feels like it's worth more than its actual amount in pounds and pence.

The wierd thing is that it has sold over 500 copies overseas in 2011-12, far more than it has in previous years. So that's a bit odd.

In non-medievalist news, I have now been a professional Java programmer for just over two months. I am getting a tad more secure about it, though there are still tons of things with which I need to get to grips. I'm really enjoying the wierd feeling that I'm learning a new sort of articulacy! When I'm more settled down with Java I'm going to learn about Aspect Oriented Programming, and also Functional Programming, which seems to be Hot Right Now. I'm probably going to be doing the Sun Java Programmer Certification at work, and I'm going to make a few Android apps.

But I'm still going to be a medievalist again from time to time, I think. I do really want to finish off my charters book. I've started unpacking some of my book boxes labelled "Academic storage", and although I might do a bit of deaccessioning, I don't think I can part with most of them. But goodness knows where I will put them all. Plus it's possible that by the time I get round to anglo-saxoning again all this Java will have pushed all the Latin out of my brain.

Röyksopp

5th December 2012

I'm currently gearing up to moving out of my parents' house and into a place of my own.  I took this morning off and spent most of it on hold to various utility companies.  It reminded me a bit of the death of Princess Diana, when the radio stations all played emergency chill-out music, with no lyrics but a woman doing vocalisations.  I think British Gas were playing Morcheeba, or maybe it was Leftfield -- very '90s.

It took me over two hours to get home tonight because the motorway was closed. My route involved a mile's walk and two separate lifts.  When I got back I found that my parents had taken a bizarre cue from Big Bang Theory and made Sheldon's favourite meal for dinner.  My mother literally explained it as Sheldon's favourite meal.  This is pasta with tomato sauce and chopped-up hot dogs.  I am now feeling guilty for being insufficiently grateful, though it did in fact taste quite bad.  (They had added lots of chopped onions and mushrooms, and I think my Dad may have put some ginger in.)

In internet news, Zoe Williams' article about the Metropolitan Police Force's new assault prevention advice has a link to this truly brilliant list of Sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work. The same website has lots of other good tips, like this handy guide to telling whether a toy is for boys or girls.

Pop love

This mix of more than 24 pop songs is very excellent (via popbitch):



I think maybe pop is so great because a lot of it is about feeling sad but deciding to be happy.  If that's true it would explain why the Pet Shop Boys are the best pop group ever.

Culm down

Here is the entrance to Uffculme. The river Culm is just round the corner, past the bend, under a bridge.

Oh no it's not!

I took this at the point where we gave up on the idea of leaving the village this morning -- we'd already tried the other two routes out.  It looks all peaceful but it was actually flowing quite strongly from right to left, with a surprisingly loud roaring noise.  Luckily the Met Office are understanding about people not getting in to work because of extreme weather conditions. The postwoman, who is an excellent cheery soul, eventually got here at about 3pm.  I'm hopeful I can get in tomorrow, if it doesn't rain too much over night.

The bad pun in the title is because I looked on twitter to see if anyone was saying anything about the Culm, and just got lots of mispellings of the word "calm".  We are a nation of illiterates.

Utility

On the other hand the downside of a job where you have to learn lots of things is that it takes a good deal of time before you can do anything useful at all. If I can get what I'm working on into the next release of the software then I may possibly do my first useful action in January. Which is quite a lot of time of not being any use.

JavaProgrammer javaProgrammer = new JavaProgrammer(Rebecca);

The poet Milton was a bit of a bastard, and one of the ways he expressed this was by teaching his daughters to read, as in to pronounce out loud, Greek, so that by listening to them he could save his failing eyesight; but he did not teach them to read, as in understand, Greek, because they were girls. The way I feel about the things I'm learning at the moment at work is a bit like they might have felt if someone had suddenly decided to teach them Greek vocabulary and grammar. There are things I've been using for ages as just things that exist -- I'm thinking predominantly of XML, but other things too -- and now I'm beginning to learn how to manipulate the things that underlie them. "Why shouldn't you have your own RESTful web service?" said one of the contractors to me the other day. "Everyone else has one." So I'm learning how to write one, and I'm going to make my own as part of a big task I'm doing. Part of this involves learning how to eat XML. And when I know how to do this I will be able to go out onto the web and eat any XML I feel like, and use APIs, and do cunning things. It's all quite complex and it will take me years of learning to be good at it, but my department has a training budget (in terms of both money and time), and I will get the chance to sort these things out. Some people who sit near me are working through the Java Sun certification exams, which is something we are encouraged to do. I am feeling very good about this. I think I had thought of the M.Sc. year as my chance to learn things, and then I would do a job where I would put those things I had learnt into practice, but I probably couldn't get away with doing any more real serious learning until I retire (when I'm going to do a theology degree). What I hadn't realised was that the M.Sc. was just scratching the surface and setting us up for continuing to learn very similar material in more depth while working. Some of it's very complex and challenging stuff -- I'm thinking of design patterns in particular, which are logical ways of making systems which can be easily extended and altered. Deep down, what I like doing is learning things.

Of course all jobs have a honeymoon period, and after a couple of years you start to see how the politics work, and get depressed about that, but at present I am enjoying the Met Office hugely. I also get to do some metereological training, which is cool.

Some things I saw on the internet

"Illiterate kids given sealed boxes with tablets figure out how to use, master, and hack them" sounds like something that would happen in a Neal Stephenson novel.

I want to visit these giant ear trumpets in Derbyshire.

Benjamin Dewey's Tragedy series no. 121 is quite good.

Some of these life hacks are great but I'm not at all sure what to make of the bagel caddy. A good idea or just really daft?

This thing exists: a Pet Shop Boys radio station that plays only Pet Shop Boys songs. (In the broad sense, though -- I just got Ian Wright's Do the Right Thing, co-written and produced by Chris Lowe.)

This four-year-old is crying for a specific reason:

Another woman singing

I do like this remix of Rebecca Ferguson's Backtrack. It really brings out the unusual quality of her voice. (If you prefer a 60s sound to "hi-nrg" dance then you might like the original better.)

Some short thoughts I had about some things

Here are my thoughts on working for the Met Office:
1) It is clear that from now on all people I meet outside the Met Office will hold me personally responsible for the accuracy or in- of all weather forecasts, and possibly for bad weather in general.
2) I like to talk about the weather -- I don't think it's dull, since it's what we live in -- and that's a big part of my small talk, such as it is. But if I say, "Good morning, isn't it a beautiful day?" to someone when I get into the office, does that count as talking shop?
3) Blimey the systems are complicated! I think I ought to be able to handle them eventually but it's going to take a while to get any sort of grip. My current logic is that they gave me the job, so I can probably do it, and if I can't then that's their fault for misassessing me.
4) I will probably post some Met Office videos here from time to time. They do some cool stuff.

Two thoughts about American politics:
1) Let's try to find it funny instead of deeply deeply depressing! Here are some binder reviews on Amazon. I like the one by the woman who can only fit 53% of herself into the binder.
2) Amanda Palmer started an interesting thing about health insurance. I look forward to reading the results. I could never live in America. I would get cancer, go bankrupt, and die -- having insurance doesn't stop you having to pay. Getting cancer and dying would be bad enough, but the bankruptcy and possible dragging down of family with me would make the whole thing significantly worse.

Here are two thought about the X-Factor:
1) Nicole seems to have joined Louis on whatever substance it is he uses to get through the live shows. But I'm disappointed that she didn't actually say "Two words: Bour-geois" to Rylan because that seemed like an interesting sort of compliment to me. But twitter says she said "Gour-geois" e.g. gorgeous, which is less interesting though maybe a tad more crazy.
2) Some cabaret people, led by Frisky and Mannish, did a riposte to Gary Barlow's pejorative use of the term. It's good but goes on a bit long.

One last thought:
I do like this remix of Taylor Swift's We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together

Violent chicken death

Any possibility that I was about to get sentimental about the countryside has been effectively prevented by the sight that met my eyes when I opened my curtains this morning: a trail of white feathers across the paddock; dark patches on the grass; and my father walking back from the far end by the trees dragging a spade. A fox got the chickens in the night, the alpacas having been moved into another field. I feel a bit sad about this, though we did know it was likely to happen some day. They were amiable chickens.

We look after my nephew tomorrow. He is very likely to notice that they are gone because checking for eggs is one of his favourite things, and I am interested to see how my mother will handle this. She has a very strong objection to lying of any sort. I don't think I ever did any wrong as a child that wasn't eclipsed many times in her eyes if I lied about it. I told him my rat died when she died peacefully of old age; we told him when the black hen died, also of old age. I think he could cope with the idea that a fox ate the chickens, perhaps better as a nearly-four-year-old than he will as a seven- or eight-year-old. Nonetheless something in me shrinks from the idea of telling him, and I don't know how his parents would react.

Next things

I start my new job at the Met Office a week on Monday, which is an excellent thing. I'm going to be one of their computer programmers. Among a number of minor but pleasant perks is that their on-site cafe is called the Iso Bar. I feel good about this.

(In London even though Masters Super Fish was maybe better I used to buy my pie and chips from the Fishcotheque. If you find yourself at Waterloo station I recommend it. It's very close, it does Pukka Pies (don't compromise!) and when I ask for extra salt and vinegar they give me extra salt and vinegar. And can you argue with a steak and kidney pie and chips for £3.70? No you cannot.)

Although I will probably be a part-time Anglo-Saxonist it also occurred to me the other day that I don't have to at all. I could take up any hobby I want to, like a normal person. And if I do do some Anglo-Saxonning there is no pressure on me to publish it! (I know an excellent scholar who never publishes anything if he can help it, his paid job being something quite different.) So I'll see how that goes. I would like to spend some time learning how to make linocuts/woodcuts, and doing some more writing.

I'll be living with my parents again until I can sort out a move into Exeter. I've had enough of moving recently, and I have unopened boxes which I packed up in November 2007, but hopefully after that move I can settle down for a while. Because I lived with my parents for a bit before the M.Sc. I have been very quick to remember their annoying habits, which are a) squabbling b) not wrapping things they put in the fridge c) saying they're on a diet and not realising that this makes certain foods unwise. My mother was really upset when I told her that pies are unhealthy, and she didn't believe me until she'd checked the side of a box. (She claims never to have heard the expression "Who ate all the pies?".) They seem to consider clotted cream a staple, and the first night I was here my mother told me about the healthy eating plan and then told me that for dinner we were going to eat up all the Tesco's sausage rolls, mini pork pies, and scotch eggs left over from the harvest festival lunch. But these things are endearing really. And I have my beautiful view back, complete with alpacas, chickens, buzzards, housemartins on the telephone wires getting ready to leave for Africa, and in the distance Culmstock beacon just in case someone sights the Spanish Armada.

USB OTG

I have just found out about a thing called USB OTG or USB on-the-go. USB connections use the concept of "master" and "slave". Suppose you plug a printer into a computer; the computer is the host and the printer is the attached device, controlled by the computer. Or I might plug my Nexus 7 tablet into my computer, and again the computer is in charge. But with USB OTG something that's usually a "slave", like a phone or my Nexus 7 tablet, can become a "master" or host for another USB device. This would usually be either an input device, like a keyboard, or a storage device, like a USB pen or an SD card in a USB reader.

The upshot of this is that with a USB OTG cable, which cost me about £1.50 off of amazon, I was able yesterday to plug an old USB keyboard into my Nexus tablet and type away merrily with no setup whatsoever. As I understand it the Nexus 7 automatically supports USB OTG for keyboard and mouse. In order to use a USB pen drive I had to download an app. I downloaded this free picture viewer app by Homesoft, and it worked well, so I think I will buy this app which allows you to use other forms of media. You can't write to the USB storage device, only read from it.* Also I haven't tested how well it works with material left in situ on the USB device. Nonetheless this is a very cheap solution to one criticism levelled at the Nexus 7, that it has limited storage and you might not be able to fit onto it all the films you wanted to watch on holiday, for example.** I have all my work ever on a 500Gb portable hard drive, and depending on how easy it is to navigate this could be a much better solution than trying to get it all into the cloud and then relying on having internet access wherever I go. Hurray!

* But you can write to a USB device using an OTG cable from the Nexus 7 if you root it, something I don't really want to do.

** Charlie Stross has a more expensive but more interesting solution.

I like this video for Gangnam Style with all the music taken out. The dancing bits and horsey bits are the best.

If you've seen the original you will probably especially appreciate it.