Kaet

How not to visit / to not visit a developing country:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/digital-replacement-of-natives.html

Reminds me of how I've often wondered, if aliens were to visit us, why we think they would be spacially compact^*. We could be passing through each other now, as mutual mists. I'd like to go on holiday, sometime, to somewhere where there aren't any photos of, and not take any photos of it. It would be nice to jump a membrane with out being a part of the tumult of hymenoclasm. But wherever I go, I'm there, so I guess that's a dream of the impossible anthropologist.

^* I suppose the answer is probably the locality of physics, and that probably depends on your approach to the Bell paradoxes. If you're a fan, like me of the decoherence approach, the problem still exists, given suitably mutually non-interacting thermodynamic buffers external to the system. Of course, that would mean that when we started to detect each others existence we'd probably have some scary, barely comprehensible inter-galactic scale wavefunction collapse. The informatic equivalent of putting molten iron in the fridge, just with many more zeros. Which would be cool, from a distance.

I was fed up of all the travelling so I elected that someone else at work go to New York for the MoMA meeting. I also need to do actual work, sometimes, and I don't like to be responsible for endless travel.

Now I find out that I miss going there whilst the new painstation is being exhibited, :(.

Also, I'm almost tempted to have a look at On Mirrors Edge. I've never really been into beat-em-ups, but this one seems to be a great opportunity to wander around a city and explore industrial plant.

I don't know if anyone here speaks Welsh, but it wouldn't surprise me. I loved the story about this sign, which seems not to have got the prominence it deserved. In Welsh, and apparently without any plausible explanation (ie this isn't a typo, or simple substitution) it says "bowel inflammation overturned".

Does anyone else find that their writing style changes massively depending on what they're reading at the time?

For writing fiction the effects the biggest, of course. But even in office communication a perceptive person would be able to tell whether I've been at the Powell or the Brecht. I wonder if I'll ever have a personal style?

1) watching the Snooker
2) trying to draw Weston Hills Tunnels in GIMP as an illustration for a blog thing I contribute to. (need to colour it now).

Copious safety play and photos of Baldock bypass: livin' on da edge.

I visited Papworth hospital recently. Of course the place was full of all kind of health and safety devices and signs as is only right in a hospital, but to someone who's well can look a bit neurotic on first glance. So I was amused to pass a gardener on the way back from the cafe who was joyfully swinging and revving a hedge-trimmer to a heartily-voiced Rule Britannia, as he walked down the main footpath, full of the joys of spring, obliviously sending passing doctors and patients into wide avoidances.

Thanks to everyone who pointed out this week's HIGNFY: well worth watching!

The one upside of my Johnson running London is that it will give the capital's (ie the UKs) columnists and pundits sufficient time to realise what a car crash it would be to have Cameron's lot in to bat on a national scale long before any general election, without having to ruin the whole country for five years finding out. It's not often London takes the grenade, but lets hope it does this time.

Okay, so I'm getting into the whole Last.FM+iTunes thing now, when I'm working. So I'm starting to wonder again where I might find a setlist a bit like this, for proper dancing. Also somewhere not overly teeny would be great, as I don't want to be the dad at the disco, :).

Covenant, Underworld, The Shamen, Front 242, Apoptygma Bezzerk, Pig, Scooter, Ultraviolence, Utah Saints, Grendel, Goteki, Nitzer Ebb, Leather Strap, ....

(does that list look overly mad?)

Thanks to aardvark179: tea song, Thou Shalt not Question Stephen Fry

Watching Stephen Fry do that Gutenberg programme, where he mentioned the analogy between carbon offsetting and papal indulgences made me wonder, has anyone tried an application of the good Dr Luther's 95 theses according to that analogy, and seeing what comes out? I was going to have a go myself, but the toad is back, :(.

I could really do with dancing to way too much Gabber-style hardcore right now.

Interesting to see Adobe making the UK a part of North America here.

Even more interesting is that it's cheaper for me to buy a new computer to install GIMP and Inkscape on than to buy a copy of just Illustrator. (MacOS X11 apps don't support graphics tablets).

Edit: thanks to antinomy, I meant MacOS X11 apps, not MacOS X apps.

Today was bright and warm. The men in dayglo jackets who are building bus shelters on Drummer Street dozed in their trucks or chatted around piles of sand. A man from Stagecoach, who monitors the buses year after year, wore his floppy cricketing hat and drank tea in a cafe-front chair, surveilling the sky.

The only worker at his station was a young, thin, crew-cut man who guarded a yellow metallic barrow in the very middle of the lethargic chaos. He stood in front of the long, raised lid of the traffic-light controller, like an organist at a console, his jacket glowing diabolically in the sunshine, and contentedly conducted the traffic around obstructions, like a boy with a train set at the start of a summer vacation.

The problem with giving people what they want is that no focus group will ever say 'this':

Pieta Image

(found at random in google images while looking for a picture of a Ball Grid Array chip package).

I think I've found a photo which I could use as a basis for the gold-leaf airport picture I was talking about.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=317863332&size=large

Also, I've found out the name of the leaf that I like: Moon Gold, apparently. It's mixed with palladium to give it the silver and pink hints: much less bling, and a better match with the tarmac. Do you see what I'm trying to get at with the gold thing? What I need then is some kind of paint which you can speckle in tiny dots and it nevertheless hold up against a dark background. That will do for the blue and cyan lights (I will probably bugger about mightily with the composition (not least due to my own incompetence), but they're blue and cyan in the photo). Not sure what to do about the big "hairy" lights yet, though. It would be nice to give them "eye" style hairs, not camera style ones^*. Perhaps knife cuts down to some kind of substrate?

Oh, and the planes should be in a strangely 'natural' shaded effect, like the way faces of icons were.

Seeing the manuscripts in the flesh in Baltimore, and then seeing 1ngi's tree picture on flickr gives me the idea, but I know I'm not competent enough to carry it out, :(. Still, exercising your incompetence has its own rewards, I guess.

(*) when you look at a bright light in the dark with your eyes, you get radiating lines which diverge near the edge of your field of view. I'm not sure if this is an appeture effect, a lens-shape effect, or an eyebrow-diffraciton effect, or a kaet's eyesight effect. They look a bit like the biohazard sign, whereas with cameras they're straight, and look like radiation hazard signs.

Whilst I was in Southampton I had a peculiar taste in my mouth, which was most like the smell of burnt candle wax. It was a very oily, waxy, smell, a sort of sunflower oil mixed with beeswax, but most like the wax from extinct candles. It was certainly unpleasant, I almost felt like I needed to wash my mouth, and I didn't think anything of it, as sometimes these things happen.

But I had the same sensation today, though less intense, in Emmanuel Street, which is where the buses get clogged in Cambridge. And that got me thinking. The place I went to in Southampton was very clogged with heavy traffic, and I wondered if the smell/taste could be due to some new (bio-?) additive of diesel? I think I've got a good nose for organics: i wonder if anyone else here has noticed it?

On the subject, one of sphyg's hair gel pots smells of that thing I describe as cucumber/watermelon which is one of the reasons I dislike cucumber so much. It's a perfectly good smell, just not an eating smell. It doesn't say whether it's supposed to be cucumber or watermelon, which are two smells I find really hard to distinguish. Unfortunately, it doesn't say on the ingredients what it is.

Also, wow, Ladytron are getting a lot of Radio Six airplay. Their DJs are annoyingly blokey, though, and how many idents do they need?

I discovered the other day how spectacularly easy it is to build computers these days with many ARMs: it's like back in the old days of the Z80, almost. Because external component count is a big issue, there's very little design involved. We went through a ten year era of complexity when it wasn't really possible to do this at the component level. It took a while for hobby surface-mount soldering and PCB design to catch up, and there were vast numbers of external components, particularly bleeding-edge in power supplies, which are now largely gone (thanks to cost reduction, mobility, and environmental concerns).

The problem now is that I've no idea why I would want to design/build one, any more.

Just following on from 1ngi's post about her house, something I've realised recently is that I tend to get fed up of places, and see them as stupid and naff, when I associate them storngly with myself. I used to think that this was just getting bored of a place, and moving somewhere else is a "change of scenery", but I realise that places which resist personal imprint (eg lobbies, stations, libraries, etc), I put up with much longer than places which I'm allowed to personalise but use only infrequently (eg usually vacant "hot desks").

Following on from met24's post about flying, one of the few nice things about "the red eye" is night time take off, and even just taxiing around the airport at night. At the moment, when we're in a transition between low pressure sodium and more broad spectrum lights, there's a nice balance between silver and gold. I've been dealing a lot recently with illuminated manuscripts, and so have been thinking quite a lot about that style of doing things. I don't know how to do that kind of leaf-work, but it would be great to try to do an airport at night in gold and silver leaf on black. I'm not sure how you'd get the medieval effect, though, because they tend to use strong black outlines. Perhaps you'd have to use an ink dark grey, but that would be very difficult to have big washes of without warping the paper. Perhaps you'd have to do it at dusk, or sunset. I wonder how you do all that stuff? Some Shahnama's have lovely nature detail. At BWI there were a fair few Starlings on the terminal, perching on the extensible staircase thingys and the lighting towers. There was one I saw which was just two spirals of ink and a dot, on a tree, but it was very effective. I wondered what they made of the planes, whether they made the mapping wings<->wings, etc. Very difficult to see which direction (asserting or denying) is the excessively anthropomorphic notion.

Going to Hereford at the weekend for borther's 5th wedding anniversary do. Involves much pfaff, etc.

Oh yes, I bought Working by Studs Terkel while in the US. It's very good.

Here's some things I've done recently which have helped me destress. I think they must have worked because I'm at roughly the same stress point now with many more things on my plate.

• Junk the mobile phone: as a rule most unexpected contacts are to persuade me to do something I don't really want to (eg sell), to lay on obligations (eg work), to hassle me (eg "where are you", when I'm already stressing to get somewhere), etc. So I've tried to reduce the times at which I am generally contactable spontaneously. The main one of these is to not carry around a mobile phone. The other thing this helps with is forcing other people to actually plan and also (this is almost the biggest one) to deal with it themselves. This is also includes not reading work email at home, etc.
  
• Stop using ATMs: I now just take out a big wodge from the machine inside my bank. Initially, this was because a very large number of people I know were getting their card skimmed. But it's actually helped in a much bigger way, in that I'm not constantly spending time looking for cash machines, and paying those little extra charges, also I don't have to deal with technology whilst shopping, people who can't use it, random rejections "due to unexpected...", etc.
  
• Stop listening to Radio Four: this was just a bad habit. I just listen to three and six now. Four is full of people who nobody will remember in ten years shouting at each other as if they were important, and then other people taking the piss out of them. The non-political shows tend just to be irritatingly repetitive. Ditto BBC website. Life is too short.
  
• Buy less over the internet/home delivery: sometimes you can only get it on the net, at other times life's much simpler to just walk away with the thing you've bought.
  
• Use less Public Transport: difficult if you also want to use less private transport, but there are still a lot of journeys you can make on foot and (when I get one) bike, for example by cutting out Stagecoach buses, or most inner-London tube journeys. With only a few exceptions (eg the trains, which are good) public transport is just asking for stress. It takes longer on foot/bike, but it's not nearly as stressful.
  

I need to think of some more.

Bang! The years are so short and the days are so long. Bang! The train hits points; my head the window. Bang! Some people I meet have marbling in their eyes, a whole 'nother country, a quiet rolling boil. A bubble of past carried forward, an accounting book, pencilled and totalled by hand. Bang! Biggleswade, Arlesey, the fast train through them. Years of imagining others, until a committee rules their eyes. Thoughts of last night stapled into this morning, on the fast train to London. Avoiding earth-relays, ship-to-ship, satellite-to-satellite, the possibility of meaning despit definition; between Huntingdon and London, no land in between. Hope.

This is the first few days in years that I've had the chance to be really selfish; when I've had a day or so where there isn't something that I feel that I ought to be doing; when I can just be straight anti-social, and eat pie, and watch History Channel, and write crap shit, and watch Alan Moore's Tribute to Robert Anton Wilson on YouTube, and there not really be anything else I should be doing. The stuff I should do I actually spend very little time doing, and instead spend too long not doing what I shouldn't be doing well because I'm thinking about what I should be doing.