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Day 7 in the USA
Thursday, August 28, 2003 07:35 a.m.

One day skipped because my laptop was locked in the boot of the car. So, yesterday was more conference which I’ve almost managed to forget anyway. At lunchtime went out for a walk with the Leicester crew and one of the Americans for a brief walk round the area near Menlo Park. On the way back had a stereotypical conversation about differences between American and British English (pants, pumps and nappies).

After the conference went on a magical mystery tour of Palo Alto looking for a camera. I’ve been planning to buy a digital camera while I’m here in America and decided to try and get it yesterday in time for the Bay trip today. Unfortunately, the first shop didn’t have either of the cameras I was looking for and Fry’s was sold out.

Entertainment last night was a trip to the mall with IM for a quick bite to eat and then on to spectate at a softball game that AS was playing in. Half of one team was people from Menlo Park. The audience on the other hand was almost entirely made up of Scandinavians. Softball seems to be a less interminable version of baseball. The Scandinavians seemed to think that I should have some sort of knowledge of cricket since I was from almost the right island, and consequently the patience for a full basebakll match.

AS’ team won both the match and the local city league, and so got the trophy. Since AS is leaving to return to Tromsø at the end of next week the team let her keep the enormous trophy. (She immediately started canvassing the other Norwegians for space in their luggage to take it home for her. She’s also been trying to persuade anyone to buy her car!)

After the match we went on to a local pub called the Oasis. Nothing massively special about it except that it had a fast food place built-in and it served enormous bowls of monkey nuts. Got a lift back to the motel with AS who gave vague directions to her local pub, which features in my guidebook; more of which later.

Back to conference in the morning, today’s session being a history of the world’s high-latitude incoherent scatter radars. That was more interesting than my readership is likely to believe, but it does point up the rather worrying lack of science at the conference. It’s looking like this conference could have been 3 days long without really cutting anything important out. This may not bode well for the future.

Then the organised trip of the conference, a San Francisco Bay cruise. Unfortunately San Francisco Bay is part of the ocean and we were served our lunch on the boat. And even more unfortunately I can get seasick on a millpond. That said it wasn’t actually any sort of problem. Tour itself wasn’t actually that interesting since the entire Bay was covered in low cloud bordering on fog so we couldn’t see much and what we could see was grey and dead. Still with any luck the weather will clear for the weekend.

Excursion was extremely short so to kill time between then and the poster session I went for a quick walk. Confirmed my suspicions that Palo Alto is extremely dull from ground level, it’s one big suburban sprawl with the odd office building embedded in amongst the homes. On my walk again failed to buy a camera, since the (different) shop was out of stock. >_< Also found the Nut House; “a grubbier beer-and-peanuts sort of place, where said nuts are dispensed from a huge mechanical gorilla, so watch out.” Sums it up really except that it fails to mention that the floor is entirely covered in peanut shells.

Poster session included free wine as a taunt to those of you who drink. One very interesting poster in front of which several senior scientists had a good argument while the student presenting it looked on in silence.

Day 5 in the USA
Tuesday, August 26, 2003 07:41 a.m.

Since Katy has legitimised extremely short entries I’ll keep this one a bit less verbose. Since I’m also tired again this won’t be remotely coherent either. The conference proper started today; it was very dull. Since the senior people I was with weren’t impressed by the talks either I feel legitimate in my boredom. I managed to incorrectly set my alarm clock so we were 10 minutes later than planned getting to the lecture theatre. They’re providing breakfasts now so lovely bagels to eat.

At lunch found a cash machine and got some money out. Which was a relief sicne I was down to 75c. SC from Leicester turned up at the conference; she’d been in San Francisco for the weekend staying at a youth hostel there which she described as being in a very dodgy area and surrounded by homeless. It wasn’t the hostel I’ll be staying in but it did succeed in leaving me feeling a little nervous my first ever stay in a hostel. SC is nearly finished her PhD and said she’d be changing from physics to journalism.

After the conference went to the BBC again for some drinks and then on to Ceilia’s again. Except this time it was a different Ceilia’s. (Ceilia’s is a Mexican restaurant, or in defence against accusations from certain quarters, a Northern Californian Mexican restaurant which is of course in all ways inferior to the Texan variety.) I have some bitching to do, but I’ll leave that to a later entry.

Ad for Big O on at the moment, a single episode of which I saw last night. It’s surprisingly grey and grim and strange, I could imagine liking it. But I didn’t see enough to make that kind of decision.

And now to bed.

Day 4 in the USA
Monday, August 25, 2003 07:25 a.m.

Today had the most interesting set of lectures of the school so far. Tauno talking about new pulse code systems, encoding alternating codes with alternating codes, and then a talk by John Holt from Millstone Hill about analysis techniques. On the downside he made me feel a bit incompetent, on the upside gave me a lot of ideas for where to go next. However, since my audience is unlikely to have much patience for incoherent scatter shop talk I’ll stop here (just noting that the scatter is incoherent rather than my talk.)

Had lunch at a restaurant outside of SRI since the deli there was closed; so far America is not seeming that much cheaper than the UK for food. Bought myself a copy of the Guardian at the bookshop next door, though I don’t know when I’m going to have a chance to read it.

After the last of the lectures we went to the British Banker’s Club, which is putatively an English bar and more realistically looks like a Wild West saloon roughly gone over with some random British trappings. Spent about 3 hours there chatting with people – mostly Anya and Tom. I had intended to try and meet some of the Americans, particularly the students, but it rapidly turned into a Europeans only evening.

Which nicely segues into Anya’s (Rawhide relevant) rodeo story. The trip started off as a trip to the beach; the male friend visiting her was proudly boasting about being taken by two blond women. Then they say the rodeo and decided that it looked even more interesting. Only thing is that it turned out to be a gay rodeo. So her friend got very friendly service at the bar while Anya was curtly given her beer.

Anyway had some cheese and chilli chips at the BBC and then we decamped to a seafood restaurant for some sashimi.

Too late here, off to bed now with the entry incomplete.

Day 3 in the USA
Sunday, August 24, 2003 07:11 a.m.

Slower day today in America since it was almost entirely lectures. Trying to be positive about it they were mostly good lectures.

So skip over the bulk of the day, BL arrived from Southampton arrived today. We’d made arrangements to meet some of the other school attendees for dinner, but headed back to the motel first where we met her. Unfortunately VH cried off unwell when we set out for the bus (she’d earlier said she wasn’t up to the stress of driving) so BL and I tried to get to the rendezvous by ourselves.

We made it to the bus stop, we waited at the bus stop, we got on the wrong bus, we got off at the terminus which was much too early a stop, we didn’t have enough change for the bus, we gave up and turned round, we got on a different bus, tried to pay with the wrong money, bus driver let us on anyway for free, figured out how to make the bus stop, got off and went to a diner.

After that much adventuring went back to the motel to review and blog.

The End.

Redemption Ark
Sunday, August 24, 2003 06:43 a.m.

[First page of the book is here, a real humdinger that it can't quite sustain.]

Redemption Ark is a sequel to the transhumanist space opera Revelation Space. Which is odd since, while Revelation Space wasn’t the kind of book to tie-up all of its loose ends in a pretty bow, but it didn’t read like a sequel was likely. In large part that was because of the extremely high casualty rate, but also because most of the cast that remained alive were stranded orbiting the (booby-trapped) sole planet of a fake neutron star a light-year from the nearest inhabited planet, the population of which wants them dead, in a diseased and probably mad starship.

The book skirts the issue of escape by having it happen largely offscreen in the past, and the issue of the decimated cast list by setting the majority of the action in the Yellowstone system, that dominated the author’s first book Chasm City, with a whole new set of actors.

There are two events that serve to set the plot in motion; the first is the return of a dead starship sent out by the human Conjoiner faction to explore, the second is the arrival in the Resurgam system of the Inhibitors, the intelligent life exterminators that were hinted and shadowed in the previous books. By the end of the book the Conjoiners are split by betrayal and the planet Resurgam has been destroyed along with its sun.

The novel’s weak points are the same as the rest of Reynold’s books – the plot begins to meander at the halfway point and becomes more confused until it reaches a conclusion that is a mix of deus ex machina and disappointment, as well the characters can act more than a little oddly. Reynold’s characters are perfectly fine until faced by someone with a conflicting agenda, at that point they never seem to even consider allianc or cooperation. In this book it is particularly annoying as the two main viewpoint characters, both of whom we have some to sympathise with, lock horns in battle for the poorest of reasons.

With the criticisms done I can say that I really enjoyed the book. It had more zip than the previous books, which were already good. It’s late here, I might tidy up the entry later but for now: good book.

Day 2 in the USA
Saturday, August 23, 2003 04:02 p.m.

Conference is at Stanford Research International at Menlo Park which is about 3 or 4 miles from the motel. Whoever is running the conference is clearly evil since we had to be there for 8 in the morning to register. Met a few familiar faces from previous conferences and then settled into 8 hours of lectures. >.<

Not much to say about the lectures, I suspect that the majority of them were too advanced for students like me and too simple for the slew of professors in the audience. The worst of the bunch was the final lecture which had, for the equations, black text on a dark background. At that point I just gave up and zoned out for the duration.

The good things about the conference – WiFi in the lecture theatre so I can get online during the breaks (and maybe if my conscience fails, during the lectures) and sandwichs made to order. Sourdough bread at the conference isn’t like my mother makes ;) but it’s not bad.

After the lectures for the day ended we took a brief trip to Fry’s to show it to a friend of VH’s (who I actually taught for a few weeks at Longyearbyen). I don’t think I mentioned yesterday the bizarre decoration of the hangar sized shop – it’s full of cacti and cowboys and Indians. Why? Who know.

Then we had a Mexican meal with further driving adventures when we found the carpark was full. Meal was very pleasant and large. The staff were genuinely Mexican but their English left a little to be desired which made ordering and asking for info a bit tough. Ended up sitting beside JP St Maurice who I’d taken a real dislike to at the Wernigerode conference 4 years earlier. He asked questions at the end of every talk, normal having an argument with the speaker. He was at again this time during the lecture too. However, he is possibly sharp enough to carry it off and besides seems pleasant enough on a social basis.

Then day over; wrote blog entry in the motel while watching Cartoon Network and Stargate SG-1. How I miss Cartoon Network. Advertising heavily a new series of Duck Dodgers (but without the 25 and a halfth century) for those who might be interested.

Happy Birthday
Saturday, August 23, 2003 07:19 a.m.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LIZ!
It’s still your birthday here, or at least it will be for another 40 minutes.

“That pimple is staring at us.” “I hate that.” Grim Adventures of Bill and Mandy on Cartoon Network

Day 1 in the USA
Saturday, August 23, 2003 07:14 a.m.

First blog entry from America, but it’s late here in Palo Alto so this is going to be a short entry. Arrived here safe and sound after a fairly uneventful set of flights – Heathrow to Vancouver with Air Canada and then on to San Francisco with United. A horribly early start at 5 AM and an accidental snubbing of my colleague VH on the bus to the airport; really didn’t see her. We got assigned separate seats so I didn’t see much of her till Vancouver.

We went through US immigration at the pleasant Vancouver airport. Initial brush with immigration was with the extraordinarily friendly Canadian guards who checked we had all the necessary documents and then on to a probably Texan actual immigration official who asked me a single question before waiving me through. Considering the horror stories I thought I’d heard about getting into the US this seemed easy.

Of course our luck didn’t last – VH’s bag had disappeared and we sat and waited and waited for it to turn up. Which it eventually did ^_^ We hurried on and caught our flight which had just started boarding. I did have one weird moment while going through security; they x-rayed my backpack and then took me aside. I assumed they wanted me to open it but instead they had me prove that the clips all clipped. Odd.

(Read two books on the planes; reviews to follow at some point. Ultra-executive summary – “The Raphael Affair” dull, “Redemption Ark” good.)

Largest adventure of the trip proved to be the drive to the motel. VH was the only one of us with a driving license and the rental car had already been booked in her name. She’d already expressed her nervousness at the prospect of driving in the US but I hadn’t initially taken it too seriously. Everything went fine – left the airport, made it onto the interstate and took the exit to Palo Alto. Then things went wrong, my navigation failed – we should have gone straight and instead turned left. Unfortunately (and this part couldn’t really be blamed on me I feel J) we initially turned into oncoming traffic as VH temporarily forgot which side of the road we were supposed to be driving on.

With that escape behind us we proceeded to try and get back on to the correct road. After a couple of complete circuits we eventually got back onto the right road and made it to the motel unscathed. Did learn during our peregrinations the far more worrying fact that VH didn’t know her left from her right. (Have some vague recollection that she had told me she was dyslexic.) It’s very difficult to navigate for someone who neglects to tell you something like that until several dozen miles and many turns. >_<

The Super8 motel we’re staying at is definitely a bit downmarket, but the rooms are comfortable enough, spacious and have cable TV (nearly a 100 channels) and sweet, sweet internet. If only some of the other guests weren’t skaters doing loud (jetlag make loud bad) tricks in the courtyard outside. Before turning in for the unsuccessful early night we went for a meal in a diner and took a preliminary shopping trip to Fry’s. Diner meal was almost up to stereotype – food was very fast, service was overly attentive but food was merely large rather than enormous. The food was also good but that’s incidental.

Fry’s is an electronics shop but that really doesn’t express just how massive it is, roughly the size of an out-of-town Tesco superstore. An earlier version of me would have been in raptures surrounded by so much hardware. The current version of me was more than a little happy about what was there. Checked out the digital cameras, took a look at the DVDs and bought a USB cable for my mp3 player.

And then a restless nights sleep before the school in the morning.

A review and catchup
Thursday, August 14, 2003 11:45 p.m.

Nothing very exciting today, pleasant enough day puzzling out some more maths but nothing worth blogging. Instead I've written another book review and done some catch-up blogging of mroe interesting times.

Friends and Electric Eels
Thursday, August 14, 2003 11:44 p.m.

Before it has time to fade from memory altogether – I give you Sunday 3 August.

After a late start headed into Oxford to act as AM’s tour guide. We walked in through Christ Church Meadow. Went to the Museum of Oxford on St Aldgates (at the southern end of the Town Hall). Not a planned stop, but AM was already suffering from the sun. The museum isn’t that impressive, but on the other hand it is cheap, so it balanced out.

Didn’t get any more of a chance to show AM round Oxford since she headed off to Banbury to visit some other friends. Which gave me a chance to do some clothes shopping. I’m normally fairly ambivalent about clothes shopping – it’s a bit of a chore but I don’t hate it. Except that it was trousers I needed which always brings upon me the crushing difference between self-image and reality. Anyway don’t want to carry on down this whinge, suffice it to say I eventually bought three pairs of trousers in the sales.

Collected AM from the station again and then at home waited for JR to arrive. Hadn’t seen him in years, in fact not since his improbably vituperative (and poorly understood) collapse in friendship with JH. Seems well, but we didn’t really get beyond small talk either there or during the meal at the Mongolian Wok Bar. Did make my first trip to G&D’s in several weeks though and had an overly sweet Cookie Monster. Dim Bar cookies sound better than they actually taste.

Then I dumped my friends in favour of going to a band, a J-rock band to be exact. Electric Eel Shock were not the stunning performers I had been lead to believe. But then the enthusiastic reviews from CJD would probably have required a team of minor deities to have been playing guitars and thrashing drums. I’ve put up some photos of the gig at my Photo blog but they did have a lot more charisma than those photos can show. Their slogans seem to be “E-mail” (said in the kind of threatening way that a heavy metal band should say the word “Satan”) and “double peace”.

Picked up a t-shirt and album at the gig before heading home which also finished the days shopping.

Hidden Empire
Thursday, August 14, 2003 10:55 p.m.

For some reason, possibly related to insanity, I stayed up late last night and read Hidden Empire by Kevin J. Anderson. This was definitely not worth it.

First of all the book is subcaptioned “The Saga of the Seven Suns – Book One” which should in theory make this review provisional since it will obviously have plot threads and characters that can only really be evaluated in light of the later books. In practice it’s such a nest of clichés, so astoundingly predictable, that there’s no danger of that.

It’s an out and out space opera. You might remember I reviewed another old-school space opera, The Praxis, a few weeks ago. Well this is a much more straight-forward space opera in that all the standard trappings (lasers, space merchants, hyperdrive, etc.) are in place and obviously haven’t been thought through at all. Well, in fairness this has one slight deviation from cliché; instead of the Wild West in Space we get the Hanseatic League in Space.

The book is a many-chaptered thing, 115 in fact, each dealing with one characters viewpoint. You might expect, that combined with the large cast of point-of-view characters, that things might rapidly get confusing. Fortunately the author has a simple straightforward solution; each character has exactly one trait, and generally in the course of a chapter one thought is allowed to play out. This makes reading the book amazingly quick – read the first paragraph of a chapter to establish which character on and what they’re thinking, skim a few paragraphs here and there to keep on track and move on to the next chapter. Of course some sneaky authors might try to develop a character or insert a plot twist making such a method impossible, but Anderson never deviates from the bleeding obvious.

Here’s the final sentence of the book and in principle a major spoiler: “’We did not lose our memories,’ Sirix said. The Klikiss robots fell upon the doomed archaeologist, their weapon-arms extended. ‘We lied’” Didn’t get that several hundred pages ago? Please get in contact immediately, I have a great package deal on London Bridge and Big Ben at the moment.

Summary: characters one-dimension short of cardboard, a plot that runs along on rails and joyless functional writing. Rush out and buy it now.

You know, she'll be insufferable now
Tuesday, August 12, 2003 11:24 p.m.

Successful day at work in which I actually managed to figure out (most of) an “it can be shown that”. Of course I still don’t have a handle on what a complex Gaussian is, but then neither does anyone else at work so I’m not alone in my ignorance!

Went to see Pirates of the Caribbean tonight with JT and Laura. Liked it a lot even if it was a little overlong. JT’s comment on leaving was “who let Johnny Depp act like that?”, which is a fair question. Captain Jack Sparrow was beyond a shadow of a doubt the thing that made the film but when the other characters are taking the piss out of the acting in-character you know that you’ve transcended simple ham.

For me the funniest bit of the film was his second stranding on the desert island and his reaction to the disposal of his sweet, sweet rum. Surprise of the film for me was the treatment of the English characters; Jonathan Pryce gets to play a British governor who isn’t a sadistic headcase but a caring father and, totally breaking stereotype, Jack Davenport is a British captain and love rival who isn’t irredeemably evil and stupid! And the British stiff upper lip is definitely present in this film, oh yes. Pirate crew of undead and unkillable blood-crazed murders? Let me at’em.

Haven’t really got anything more to add to the other enthusiastic reviews, so waves cutlass.

A weekend of sloth
Monday, August 11, 2003 11:41 p.m.

Right I still have a busy Sunday from the weekend before last to blog and Terminator 3 to review, but sod those. I’m going to put up a quick entry about the most recent weekend. After all I’m going to be bust going to Pirates of the Caribbean tomorrow night, *waves cutlass in anticipation*

Got home on Friday and just flopped down on the bed without energy, most of it probably sucked up by the heat which seems never to end. Eventually worked up the effort to watch some of the stuff that’s clogging my hard-drive; things I’ve downloaded and haven’t yet watched. I keep forgetting how much I actually enjoy Gundam SEED, it’s basically more soap opera than space opera, but dammit it still has giant robots in it so that’s OK.

Decided that Saturday would be the day I’d actually get round to burning and posting all the CDs I’d promised to send people. Of course I found I owed so many that I had to go into Oxford to buy some more blanks as well as to buy envelopes and boxes to post them in. First though went to the library where I’d managed to rack up about £5 in fines by being a single week overdue (on a lot of books admittedly).

Met up with CJD while I was in Oxford and had an impromptu picnic by the canal with food bought from Sainsburys. They’re cinnamon and raisin bagels aren’t as good as Tesco’s but they do sell good blueberry bagels. Conversation wasn’t terribly deep but it was a nice place to sit and chat. Finished up the rest of the shopping and then walked as far as the model shop on St Clements with him. He was buying a model of the Enola Gay for a friend’s son!

Had already checked the closing time of the post office which gave me just over 2 hours to burn all the CDs. Managed to make it to the post office just in time; covered in sweat, which was hardly surprising given even the slightest exertion that day. Managed to look a complete fool, mixing up the postage on the parcels and failed to finish wrapping them before the post office closed. Didn’t actually get everything in the post till Monday morning.

That night went to Wantage for a DVD night with CJD and DN, going via Abingdon. Got to see CJD’s temporary lodgings. Probably for the best that he’s gradually easing out of his old life but I think it’s still going to hit him when he loses the car and has to find rented accommodation. At DN’s ended up watching Highlander for the first time!

Mini-review: it was probably good at the time but it’s deeply unimpressive now. It’s clearly an action-movie despite the veneer of historicism and mysticism, and in this day and age it doesn’t have either the most impressive fights, effects or pacing. DN then trapped us into watching the start of Apocalyse Now (in fact the extra-long Apocalypse Now Redux). But we bailed shortly after the Ride of the Valkyries helicopter scene.

I’d already started reading Broken Angels while waiting for the bus. Read sme more of it when I got home. Slept for 8 hours, got up and read some more Broken Angels. Finally put it down at 14:30, still in my pyjamas having achieved nothing in what was supposed to have been a very busy day. Went to Tesco’s, fetched bike from city-centre and tidied my room a little. Then sat down and read Watchmen. Stupid Ivan, there goes the bike repairs >_<

Oh well, felt much better for a properly restful weekend. Of course Mr. Stomp turned up that night after a week’s absence but, heh, into every life a little rain must fall. He’ll be gone soon ^___^

Another splurge
Sunday, August 10, 2003 11:15 p.m.

Exactly a week behind in blogging with about 4 entries needed to catch-up with realtime. Included below is about half of last weekend and a book and graphic novel review from this weekend.

I've posted these entries at a blog on my own site which has the advantage that people can leave comments. I'll be running these blogs in parallel for a for weeks anyway, I think.

Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons.
Sunday, August 10, 2003 11:14 p.m.

It’s a classic deconstruction of the superhero genre; it’s ugly and ultimately dull. This will be a short review because though its normally regarded as on of the key components in the reinvention of comics during the 80s, I just don’t dislike or care about it enough.

(For those in the audience it comes dedicated with special thanks to Neil Gaiman amongst others)

Set on a subtly alternate history Earth where superheroes have been influential in history and eventually subject to government regulation. The central theme of the comic seems to be “Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes” – who watches the watchmen? This anthology doesn’t seem to be much interested in answering the question or even in raising it in all but the vaguest of ways.

Meh, I can’t be bothered; it’s not bad just not very good.

Broken Angels by Richard Morgan
Sunday, August 10, 2003 11:10 p.m.

You see. You’re defending him. You use your own self-hated to let him slide off the scope and save yourself a moral judgement”
Of course a much more characteristic quote from this bloody (an adjective used in its most literal sense) novel would involve the loving description of several dozen soldiers. The novel is sequel to Morgan’s hard-boiled ultra-violent science-fiction detective novel Altered Carbon. In the future life is cheap. How cheap? Well, let’s look at the setting.

Humanity now has a star-spanning centrally controlled empire built from two key components. The first and simplest is faster-than-light (FTL) communications. However, our descendants haven’t managed physical FTL so travel between the stars is still a slow decades long slog at sublight speeds. This setup is an old standby of sci-fi; it tends to be used to setup heartbreaking or wistful tales of separation. But that’s not remotely how this story is going to work.
[The sharp amongst you will be wondering how you can run an empire if it takes an inspection team 40 years to arrive for the audit (or perhaps more pressingly a gunboat 40 years to turn-up to suppress the rebels). Well the answer’s ahead.]

The second key technological difference of the 26th Century is that the human mind can be digitised. Everyone has armoured and lodged in the upper vertebrates of their spine a “stack” which constantly stores the current state of their mind. Death is only permanent if the stack is destroyed, a crime much more horrible than simple murder.

Combined these two technologies allow the rich and important to travel the stars instantly – at their destination they’re simply sleeved in the body of a clone or criminal. It also puts immortality in their reach. Dying of disease or old-age? Resleeve in a healthier and/or younger body. Died in an accident or assassination? Retrieve yourself from the surviving stack or loose a few days and restore from a backup.

The final element of the setting is the government – the UN Protectorate. Corrupt and bought, both controlling and controlled by interstellar corporations it keeps an iron grip on the colonies. It’s most elite shocktroops are the Envoy Corp, soldiers conditioned to loyalty and almost superhuman adaptability.

Which segues nicely into our protagonist Takeshi Kovacs. Kovacs is definitely no kind of hero, the corruption and easy-death of the setting have soaked into him leaving him more than merely cynical. Over the course of the story he betrays he apparently betrays every faction, side and person he encounters. I say apparently because there are a very select few that he doesn’t really betray.

Since setting and characterisation are dealt with we move onto the plot. Altered Carbon was at heart a murder mystery; Broken Angels is much more of a McGuffin hunt. The blurb on the back of the book reveals about as much as can safely be revealed without spoilers:
Sleeved in a damaged Wedge-issue combat body, Takeshi Kovacs is serving in a brutal little Protectorate-sponsored war to put down the revolution on Sanction IV.
Taking the chance to join a covert team trying to secure an archaeological prize, Takeshi is dropped into a maelstrom of treachery and betrayal that makes the front-line a happy memory. For this is a prize whose value is limitless and whose dangers are endless. It’s a prize that the corporations will kill for. A prize that will take mankind to the brink.”

And finally to my opinions. First of all it really is bloody and violent, but I’m almost wholly immune to these when faced with them on the written page so I can’t really say whether the squeamish would have any problem with them. The characters are not, and are not supposed to be, very sympathetic. Most of them are hardnosed killers, in fact even those you might not expect to be. As an example, the book’s principle corporate shark engineers a nuclear strike on a city of 100,000 just to clear the area near the digsite.

Of course this violence and array of disposable actors is largely what allows the novel to propel itself forward at such breakneck speed. A more pressing problem is one that also served to hobble Altered Carbon, there are just too many twists and turns. In both books I found myself reading the last third or so with suspension of disbelief disintegrating around me as plot and counterplot finally explode into the open.

Final opinion – frenetic and enjoyable with a nice eye for balletic violence and a cracking pace but saddled with a plot that gives out before the end.

London, Daredevil and crisis
Sunday, August 10, 2003 11:08 p.m.

{Refers to Saturday 2 August} Saturday got up after a little lie-in and headed to London with AM to meet another college friend, JH, and his girlfriend AD. Before we set out AM and a badly hungover Mr. Stomp had there first meeting, but no real impression made on either I suspect. *glee at what’s to come*

Met up with JH and AD at Piccadilly where I got given gifts. ^____^ Apparently I was owed birthday presents so I got copies of Gunbuster and the Animatrix. At least as good was faced with a request for Japanese shop knowledge. They were going to a surprise party in Brighton later that evening and wanted to get some sake to give as their gift. Took them to Mituskoshi first which it turns out doesn’t actually sell alcohol. Then to the Japan Centre where they did buy some sake downstairs in the supermarket.

That done we headed for Green Park for somewhere to sit and enjoy the sun. On the way we stopped into the Japanese confectioners near the Royal Academy the name of which has escaped me, but didn’t buy anything.

Made a much more substantial stop at Fortnum and Mason which has always seemed far too posh for the likes of me. There JH bought AM her missing birthday present – a kilo of self-selected chocolates. The counters at Fortnum and Mason are either a heaven or hell for chocolate lovers; so much chocolate, so many choices. AM generously shared some of her chocolates with us and they really were exquisite.

Sat on the grass at Green Park for a few hours and chatted away. It was a few months since I’d last seen JH and AD (his birthday in fact) so there was quite a bit of catching up to do. Gobbled down sandwiches, strawberries and chocolates. ^_^

Most unusual thing about the stay in the park was that we were surrounded by fake air hostesses for most of our time there. Next day was the first annual Flugtag, a silly competition for manned flight across the Solent. Apologies for my more innocent readership but it’s quite enjoyable to be surrounded by good looking young women in uniform. Even better when they hitch up their skirts to jump over a waist-height fence. *cough* How about them trout?

After arriving back from London AM and I couldn’t be arsed to actually do anything as energetic as going to a restaurant or getting takeout so we just bought a pizza for the oven and rented ‘Daredevil’, despite Lizzu’s memorable warning to me. (Walking past the Odeon Magdalen St she pointed to the poster and said, “Don’t go to that, it’s shit”.) Well, it may be crushingly lowered expectations talking but it was only very poor!

I was setting-up the laptop in the sitting-room to play the DVD while AM was taking care of the pizza in the oven when Mr. Stomp came down. In the kind of charm offensive that even he must only occasionally be able to muster he proceeded to launch in to conversation with AM about the evils of religion and Christianity in particular. AM told him to his face that he was offending her!

Ah, Mr. Stomp – how do you manage to piss people off so quickly and efficiently?

Went to bed after the film but before that did some chatting. I’d been invited to go see the J-rock band Electric Eel Shock by a friend from work the following night and was undecided. He’d described them as the best live act he’d ever seen which is the kind of recommendation it’s hard to argue with. That night was a bit congested since AM wasn’t interested in the band and another friend from uni, JR, was going to be visiting.

Bombshell that decided me in favour of going was the sad news that my colleague had moved out of home and was having a trial separation from his wife. With unsettling news to send me to sleep went properly to bed.

Start of AM's visit
Sunday, August 10, 2003 10:27 p.m.

{Entry refers to Friday 1 August}

I worked at home on Friday since AM was arriving mid-afternoon from Manchester and I didn’t want to have to take time off work to meet her at the station. Train arrived only marginally late which given my own most recent experiences makes me wonder if services might actually be improving!

Took AM home to stow her stuff and freshen up and then we headed into Oxford for a food and a film. After the usual 15 minute duel of “where would you like to eat”, “no where would you like to eat” we ended up at Old Orleans. A little underwhelmed by both the service and the food, neither being bad just not very good for the price. AM was her normal assertive self and managed to blag us one free round of (soft) drinks.

My normal paranoia was kicking in by the end of the meal about whether we would have time to get good seats at the cinema so we turned up ridiculously early. Must get a handle on the temporal worrying >_<. Film was Terminator 3, a proper review of which follows. For now suffice it to say that we both enjoyed it.

After that headed home for an early night since we were both fairly exhausted from separate sleepless nights earlier in the week. Conversation on the way home was a bit tortuous since I unwarily and unwisely managed to set the conversation on to evolution and a little bit of cosmology. Not a wise tack with someone as Christian as AM. Assumed that her Catholicism would protect me from biblical literalism, but either my impression of doctrine is incorrect or she’s more literal than actually necessary. Still easy to forgive in the light of later events ^_^

House was deserted when we arrived home but apparently Mr. Stomp arrived home drunk after I fell asleep. Must have been really tired since he didn’t manage to wake me up.

To bed
Wednesday, August 6, 2003 11:35 p.m.

Got distracted by MSN chatting :) so more catch-up blogging tomorrow.

Thursday's Films
Wednesday, August 6, 2003 11:03 p.m.

My week perked up a bit on Thursday when I actually did something. Trip to the cinema on Tuesday to see ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ had been called off due to lack of interest. So on Thursday went with JT to a double-bill of that and ‘Goodbye, Lenin!’. Some reviews follow but they’re a bit half-hearted since it’s almost a week since I saw the films and my memory is growing a bit vague already.

Here’s a synopsis of the plot of ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ from the IMDB
The setting is the late 1980s, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall. At a lone American army outpost in Germany, drugs, women, and material possessions are rampant among the troops, due to the lack of combat. Ray Elwood (Joaquin Phoenix) is an army specialist under the command of Col. Wallace Berman (Ed Harris, in a refreshingly silly performance), but Elwood runs the show behind the scenes. Retrieving and cooking the drugs sold to his fellow officers, along with other black market dealings, Elwood is flush with cash and time, a deadly combo for a trained soldier. When a new officer, Sgt. Robert Lee (Scott Glenn), arrives on base, he makes it his personal mission to take away all the amenities that Elwood enjoys. This sets off a war between the two that threatens the corrupt framework of the base, and the heart of Lee's own daughter (Anna Paquin), for whom Elwood has feelings for.

And now some thoughts from me about the film in no particular order. First of all it is a good comedy but the emphasis is definitely on the black – there are plenty of funny situations and lines but precious few laughs. An insane rampage by a drugged up tank crew is amongst the more over-the-top moments but the humour is punctured by the explosive deaths of some soldiers.

The troops, tanks and other vehicles initially struck me as looking odd. About half-an-hour into the film I realised that it was because they were in temperate camouflage, not the desert camouflage that you unconsciously expect from the last year of television news.

Ray’s love interest Robyn, played by Anna Paquin, and his nemesis Sergeant Lee are also a little unusual. The former because she’s not the conventional Hollywood love interest for this kind of film – she’s not the pure as driven snow character who will ultimately redeem her gold-hearted man. Instead she’s the sort of teenager who takes E and only initially agrees to go out with Ray because it will piss her father off.

Her father, the sergeant on Ray’s case, is again lined up as a familiar archetype – the hard-nosed drill sergeant who shows a human side and turns out to be a father figure. Except it never happens, he really is the psychopath you assume he can’t be.

The only serious weakness the film has is that the unexpected revelation which final releases the building tension isn’t actually a surprise, but it’s easy to forgive the film this lapse.

Under normal circumstances ‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ would be one of the better comedies you’d be likely to encounter at the cinema, but this week it’s outshone by both ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ and ‘Terminator 3’! Before we go any further it should be pointed out that ‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ isn’t just any comedy; it’s a German comedy, an idea the average British person seems to find intrinsically funny. It doesn’t mean that it’s not funny though.

The film is set in the former East Germany, with a kind of prologue stretching up to the fall of the Wall. In the protest just before the Wall Alexander Kerner is beaten by the police while his apparently ultra-loyal to the Communist Party mother looks on. She has a heart attack which leaves her in a coma. She wakes months later with Germany reunified and about to win the World Cup. However, Alexander is told that even the slightest stress may kill her, such as learning that her entire world has been swept away. Thus begins the films main plot as he struggles to recreate the DDR in his mothers bedroom.

The film’s chief problem is its length, it stretches its single main joke a bit too far. The other problem is a little more subtle; the film isn’t really the nostalgia piece for the old East that some have accused it of being, instead it’s an illustration of how good intentions can build a police state from a tissue of lies. The film thus can’t build as much sympathy for Alex and his mother as it perhaps needs.

Not bad but if you have to choose got to ‘Buffalo Soldiers’.

Dull statistics rant
Wednesday, August 6, 2003 11:02 p.m.

Work – work has been extremely dull because I’ve spent the last week and more reading statistics and reading statistics and doing some statistics reading. General statistics and Bayesian statistics, covariance matrices and fourth moments of complex normal distributions, it’s gotten to the stage where I find myself thinking about them even when I’m not at work >_<

Why am I up to my neck in statistics? My main task at work is to maintain and develop the software used to analyse the data taken at the EISCAT sites. The main tool used to analyse this data is called Guisdap and was developed by the Finns about a decade ago. The main thing you need to know about the Finns is that they like nothing more than a good silence. No unnecessary comments clutter up (or explain) their source code. Even there maths is so terse as to defy easy comprehension.

Recently we’ve developed a need to better understand how Guisdap calculates the errors on the parameters it returns. Unfortunately nobody really seems to have already known so it’s fallen on me to find out. (This is of course disingenuous since I’m already supposed to know <_< >_>) Hence hundreds of pages of statistics.

Have I mentioned that I’ve never actually been properly taught statistics? *sigh*
Nearly there anyway, I’ve started writing up what I’ve managed to figure out.

Too tired
Monday, August 4, 2003 10:31 p.m.

Too tired to blog but here's an outline of what I'll be writing on Wednesday when I'll have time to blog:

Monday-Friday: Dull statistics reading
Thursday Night: Buffalo Soldiers and Goodbye, Lenin!
Friday Evening: AM arrives, dinner at Old Orleans, Terminator 3
Saturday: Trip to London, picnic, pizza and Daredevil, friend’s marriage breakup
Sunday: Tour of Oxford, clothes shopping, visit by JR (Mongolian Wok and G&Ds), Electric Eel Shock

In brief
Sunday, July 27, 2003 09:20 p.m.

The binge happened a bit earlier than expected; again there are 4 or 5 entries below. A few too many are quotes of things I read but there is some news buried in there too.

Stargate slash
Sunday, July 27, 2003 09:19 p.m.

As already noted in Jane’s blog, she was in Oxford yesterday. In fact she was probably stepping off the bus as I was boarding my train. Sorry to have missed you, here’s a snippet I read on the way back that I thought you might enjoy.

Interview of Michael Shanks (Daniel Jackson in Stargate: SG-1) from this month’s SFX
“There are these t-shirts that have been printed,” he begins, slowly. “They show my face and Rick’s face [Richard Dean Anderson], from different scenes, and they’ve blended them close together so it looks like we’re moving in for a kiss. I don’t know how they did it; maybe they cut out the other half of the picture of me kissing Sha’re or something! And they wore them in front of us: ‘Hey, we’re the slashers!’ They see that the characters of Daniel and Jack are not…” he stops, carefully searching for the right phrase, “as heterosexual as they may seem. Rick and I joke about it all the time. That’s the funny thing. Rick and I joke around during scenes that they’re blocking, especially those argument scenes that we sometimes have. We’ll do it with lisps and we’ll sound bitchy with each other. The scenes kind of lend themselves to that! I think some people take it a little further than we’d expect though.”

There’s more later about a “drop-the-soap” shower scene but I wouldn’t like this entry to get too long.

As an aside, in case this is on Katy’s list of unacceptable geekdoms, I don’t normally buy SFX. I needed something to read on the train (and it actually gave more service to the polite young couple sitting opposite me than it did I!)

Panagramimatic
Sunday, July 27, 2003 07:22 p.m.

More touch-typing practice, this time from the Review section of yesterday’s Guardian.

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn
Mark Dunn (best known for the screenplay of the Truman show) has set himself the challenge of composing a story that progressively loses letters of the alphabet as it goes along. It sounds like one of those pointless escapades such as scaling Everest in roller skates and snorkelling gear but, remarkably, Dunn sustains a provocative fable about the Swiftian island of Nollop, whose inhabitants revere panagrams – sentences composed from all the letters of the alphabet. When the ‘z’ goes missing from the inscription erected to commemorate one Nevin Nollop’s coinage of the phrase “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, pandemonium breaks out and all further use of the missing letter is officially proscribed – which is not too great lexical handicap until the B, D, J, K and Q go awol as well. A highly distinctive fictional debut. Or to put it panagramatically: a quirky novel with pages of zany, jumbled lexicon.

Appreciation of the irony of typing that as a touch-typing lesson is left to the reader!

What I did in Manchester
Sunday, July 27, 2003 07:03 p.m.

So so tired; my stupidity in reading late all last week is really catching–up with me. Which is a large part of the reason I’m writing this blog entry on the train back to Oxford, I can just upload this when I get home and then crawl into my bed for the blessed sweet oblivion of sleep.

Weekend has been a bit odd on the whole; knew things weren’t quite right while trying to buy AM’s birthday present. Normally I find present buying easy, I enjoy it and the only difficulty is deciding which idea to settle on. But, I had no idea what to get her and in the end it was a bland coffee-table book, tasteful and bland. In large part this reflects the way in which we’re inevitably drifting apart – living in different cities with different circles of friends. It’s gotten to the stage where we’re more acquaintances who were once friends and could be again than actually friends. Makes me a bit melancholy but it’s basically inevitable without a lot of mutual effort.

During my degree and later working as a physicist it’s been interesting to note the way in which the field seems to preclude the normal English agnosticism. Physicists have a tendency to the extremes of godliness or atheism, and the vast majority in the UK are avowed atheists. (Even in the US, in which 95% of the population believe in some form of divinity, a majority of physicists are agnostic at most.) The reasons for this seem fairly obvious so I’ll leave such speculation alone.

AM is on the opposite wing of this divide to me; she’s a devout Christian, which will have a definite impact on this weekend as we shall see. Got off the train at Manchester Piccadilly a little early, which stunned me given the painful delays I used to suffer going to and from Manchester. The station was my first view of the changes wrought in Manchester since I last visited nearly two years ago. The main agent of these changes was last years Commonwealth Games.

In many ways the changes to the station are extremely similar to those visible on the streets of the city. The layout is the same, but there are a lot more shops in smarter glass-clad buildings. We went first for a meal at a noodlebar called Tampopo similar in style to Wagamama, but with a more general East Asian menu. AM had pad thai, while I’ve forgotten the name of the Indonesian beef and glass noodle dish I had. Pleasant enough but nothing terribly special. After that did a little bit of shopping for presents. AM needed a gift for a one-year old and since I was tagging along to a house-warming party some of AM’s were having I needed a gift for them.

Only event of note during the shopping was the visit to Mothercare. The large branch in the Arndale was closing down and in the second-last day of its stock clearance. It looked like a the aftermath of a riot with sales-mad mothers pawing through the remaining items in the sale.

On to AM’s relatively newly bought house in Salford. Put me in mind of the saying about “private wealth, public squalor”; Salford has not yet enjoyed much of the redevelopment bounty that has begun to breath new life in Manchester’s old centre, but the inside of AM’s house was large and very comfortable. That’s not meant to be as judgemental as it sounds, there’s no way in which AM is responsible for Salford’s depressing environment (in fact arguably less so than me). Still it is still a bit grim up north.

That evening went to a house-warming party at friends of AM’s who live just down the road from her. Had met one of the two newly-weds and was on nodding terms with them. A pleasant evening with friendly strangers; very like an evening with the Ass no Ryu in some ways (but with Christianity replacing anime and exploding whales and chemicals replacing cheesy songs!) I can now recommend powerlabs for those interested in all the exciting explosive things you could never do at the science lab at school.

In an admission I’ve weighed a bit before making I have AM’s student teacher friend Becky very attractive. Obviously, a very safe admission since
a) no-one reading this knows her
b) I’m unlikely to ever meet her again
c) She has a boyfriend d) I didn’t make any effort to communicate it to her
Let us never speak of this again! ;)

Following day avoided an evangelical church service through the simple expedient of having a lie-in. Once AM got back from that we set out for a pub lunch in one of the villages nearby. (Interestingly taking the A666 part of the way there) Lunch was with the newly wed housewarmers from the night before, AM’s lodger Kelly and another friend of AM’s. My own meal of gammon with a dessert of raspberry pavlova was nothing special, but I think most of the others were far from impressed with their meals.

A quick stop at Sainsbury’s, AM’s home and then to the station for this train home. A brief trip away from Oxford: vaguely enjoyable and vaguely unexciting.

Train to Manchester
Saturday, July 26, 2003 13:03 p.m.

On a new style Virgin train bound for Manchester, which (the train) is quite a bit swisher than expected. They have real electricity for laptops now!

(As some touch-typing practice) here are some bile filled highlights of this week’s Guardian Guide:

John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars
More goofy fun from the increasingly erratic director of horror. Not content with having ancient Martian spirits possessing human settlers, Carpenter has made the future a matriarchal society run by space lesbians. Natasha “the chick from Species” Henstridge is sent to a suspiciously quiet mining town – by train no less – to transport murderer Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) back to space lesbian civilisation for trial. But the headbanging hordes of zombies have different plans for them. The soundtrack, by Carpenter, Steve Vai and Guns N’Roses lickspittle Buckethead is great, so are the frequent bloody fights. Everything else is awful.

Intro to Screen Burn’s savaging of new import hip-hop drama Platinum
I’m not entirely sure why, but the term “aspirational” really gets my goat. Take the “aspirational” broadsheet Sunday supplements: are they aimed at human beings? Here’s the average content: a po-faced profile on some arse-bound artst you’ve never eard of, a 10-page photo splurge on limbless Angolan babies, a recipe for summer pudding, a page showcasing designer potato mashers costing £85 each and a column by some supercilious woman explaining What Men Think And Where They’re Going Wrong in joyless and punishing detail. If that’s what you aspire to – reclining in an Olaaf Dynstiblanq chair tutting sorrowfully over Korean sweatshops while sipping a nice glass of Shiraz – I’d suggest you alter your mental trajectory now, before it develops into full-blown madness.

Lots below
Friday, July 25, 2003 11:03 p.m.

I have definitely become a binge blogger, nothing then masses – there are 4 or 5 entries below this one. Still I don’t think any of them compare in size with her entry from yesterday. Off to Manchester this weekend for a friend’s birthday so there’s unlikely to be any entries till Monday, so more binge posting then.

Much better quiz result :)
Friday, July 25, 2003 11:00 p.m.

congratulations. you are the kiss my ass happy
bunny. You don't care about anyone or anything.
You must be so proud

which happy bunny are you?
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The Praxis
Friday, July 25, 2003 10:59 p.m.

As shown in a previous quote from this book, its rather self-consciously an old-school space opera. It’s very much in the heroic military action vein of that tradition; as a Usenet poster commented “swash is swashed, buckles are buckled, and some rip-roaring space opera is sung”.

What’s much more surprising is that hackneyed ossified and about to burst empire still manages to be quite interesting. In theory run by the all-powerful (and soon to be extinct) Shaa under their absolute and draconian Praxis law, it is in practice governed entirely by a system of patron-client relationship which seems to be directly lifted from Rome. I’m surprised by just how easy to follow this “who you know” power system is too follow and understand. Obviously it also leaves a lot of room for social maneuvering and a small number of powerplays.

Even better than that is just how well written and believable the two main characters are. The lead male character is an ambitious younger-son noble; intelligent, competent and rather pleasant under his own patina of realpolitick ruthlessness. The lead female character on the other hand is ostensibly a down on her luck aristo just starting her naval career as a fighter pilot. The books understated gimmick is that while they seemed destined for romance their one and only date ends in crash and burn disaster.

As noted the novel is in many ways military sci-fi. The fleet battles are hardish sf, with near relativistic ships firing antimatter missiles and concerned with their relative velocities and accelerations. Smaller actions are generally pacey with a clear sense of danger and tension when required. Large battles are somewhat poorer, though there is only one in the volume, feeling a bit more rushed in description and less clearly described.

Overall: an enjoyable page-turner, but it’s not the deepest or most avant-garde of books.

Concert
Friday, July 25, 2003 10:19 p.m.

Went to a concert at the Sheldonian last night. Sibellius’ Finlandia, Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante and Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique performed by the Amadeus Orchestra. I’d made the mistake the previous night of adding about 60 more photos to my Photo blog and then staying up even later to read. So I was gentling nodding off during some of the more lullaby like musical moments of the concert.

I feel badly under-qualified to say anything about the quality of the performance, but JT, who’s opinion is much more trustworthy, seemed to be fairly impressed on the whole. Personally was not overly impressed by Finlandia, enjoyed the Prokofiev – especially the rather hammy, sweat-flying performance by the cello soloist, and enjoyed several of the Berlioz movements. Not a bad way to spend an evening on the hole.

Got home around 10, quite exhausted and ready for bed. So I added about 40 more photos to the blog and then stayed up till 3 to finish the book I was reading (more of which later). Stupid, stupid me. >_<

Hulk
Friday, July 25, 2003 10:17 p.m.

‘Hulk’ was fairly indifferent as a film. My advice for those planning to see it is to read lots of reviews. Most reviews will be bad - pointing out its poor pacing, stilted acting and ropey special effect. These will act to safely lower your expectations. The few good reviews will serve to point out what you need to know to get any enjoyment from the film – the excellent comic-book simulating cuts, fades and transitions and the underlying Oedipal and psychological conflicts. The net result however is an average to poor film.

Much more of a highlight of the trip to the cinema was getting to see JBjnr again. Hadn’t seen him since the outing to Yamato (the Drummers of Japan). JBjnr was one of the most distinctive characters during my placement at the Lab, a hardcore programmer who’d think nothing of coding till 3 in the morning. Easily one of the most productive people there, he dwelt in a small darkened office issuing forth to spray amusing insults.

Absolutely brimming with energy when I saw him – imagine the genkiest of characters crossed with quite a bit of acerbic wit. I think VH and SB were a bit surprised by his Hulk impression while we were discussing the film afterwards. :D

Memories of Distant Tuesday
Friday, July 25, 2003 10:01 p.m.

The workers building Diamond managed to cut the gas line to the RAL restaurant on Monday afternoon and it wasn’t fixed till Tuesday evening so it was a cold lunch at work. The entire of RAL seems to be a building site at the moment. Several hundred yards in front of the site are currently having foundations pile-driven into them, the road in front of R71 has a trench for a power line and the hill beside ISIS is being removed.

Booked tickets for ‘Hulk’ and left work early to hurry to Oxford. At the station the next 2 trains to Oxford were late, one a fast train and one slow. Departure board said the slow train would be first to depart so pegged it from the platform I was on, bike under arm, to the right platform. Of course the train on the platform I’d just left departed first. Normally I wouldn’t blog such a small irritant in but just to cap it some used underwear fell out of my panniers as I was running between platforms.

Not the best of days thus far.

Help me!
Wednesday, July 23, 2003 09:06 p.m.

You are Helpless!

Which Stereotypical CLAMP emotion are you?
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Well, I didn't expect that!

No news of today but news of earlier in the week below
Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:33 p.m.

A bunch of blog entries today but I haven’t quite caught up with the backlog. Highlights of today, to be written up tomorrow, were watching Hulk and coming home to find that Mr Stomp had filled the house with the smell (please let it just be the smell – I didn’t have the energy to check) of shit.

Moving Eisuke
Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:30 p.m.

Got up late on Sunday and set to work on tidying up the Photo blog and adding entries to it when I got messages from Eisuke indicating that he was going to try looking for boxes and that he could possibly do with some aid in moving out of his college accommodation.

I think he must have been almost dead on his feet since he’d apparently spent 20 hours the previous day and night looking for his passport! Apparently the previous friend to help him to move had assured him that the passport had been transferred to the new room. Unfortunately it was actually living in the bottom drawer of the desk in his previous room – a fact he discovered about a minute into looking there.

Should remark now that most of (the very small number) of Oxford college porters I have met have been extremely nice people. According to Eisuke the Jesus College porters are amongst the best, a point at least partly borne out on Sunday. Eisuke had apparently failed to finish arranging permission to use one of the storerooms, so had to face a quite desultory talking to by the porter. She had apparently started work at Jesus only a few weeks before and was in evident fear of the college accommodation officer.

Still she was very helpful, gave us the key to a storeroom on her cognisance, let us open the college’s backdoor and then came and opened the storeroom for us with the master key when Eisuke managed to lock that key in the room. Took about 3 hours to transfer everything from Eisuke’s room into storage with a break or two for drinks. During one of those breaks I bought a box of Quality Streets to give to the porter in thanks.

I hope this entry hasn’t coming across as too critical of Eisuke – the work involved in moving his stuff wasn’t too strenuous and most of the problems occurred relatively off-stage. He more than made up for things by paying for one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had. ^__^ After an almost traditional: Where would you like to eat? No you decide. Oh no, you decide, etc. we ended up at Bella Pasta. I had a pizza with duck on top and plum sauce instead of tomato, absolutely gorgeous.

Eisuke stayed the night at my place since he was too tired to face the trip to London that day. Hopefully he’ll come up and visit us occasionally from London.

(Found out later that day tickets for Truck Festival, a festival for local bands sponsored by Truck Records, were in fact available. Another chance to see Electric Eel Shock missed. *sigh*

On top of that today’s Guardian review of King Priam was glowing. *sigh*)

Praxis
Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:14 p.m.

I managed to lose “The Book of Fish” over the weekend, in the extremely loose sense that it was in my panniers but in a very slightly different place than I had thought. (I found it again when I was packing them with clean clothes on Monday.) So in the meantime I began reading “The Praxis: Book One of Dread Empire’s Fall” which, despite the title, is a space opera. The following passage made me laugh:

For the Shaa [Dread Emperors of the title] were adamant that every species – that the physical universe itself - should submit to terms dictated by the Praxis [their law].Whole categories of technology were absolutely forbidden – machine intelligence and autonomy, the translation of organic intelligence into machine or electromagnetic form, machines constructed so as to manipulate matter at the molecular or atomic level. Genetic manipulation was also forbidden – the Shaa preferred the slower process of natural selection, the more unsentimental the better.

Translation: Old school is in the house, and we is doing this Golden Age stylee. ;)

Blog commentary
Tuesday, July 22, 2003 10:55 p.m.

I already seem to have a modus operandi for my blog – long silences interspersed with long entries. But this will be a small break from that pattern since I’m going to put up a series of small entries. Not only will it render it more readable but I can go to bed early tonight and continue tomorrow.

The main reason for the lack of entries is that I’ve been working on other blogs. I’ve installed Movable Type at the website provided by my ISP. That took a surprisingly long chunk of Saturday, especially the Plugin Manager which I still haven’t manage to get working. Additionally I managed to screw-up the creation of some of the files and directories so that I couldn’t delete them. More hours spent fixing that.

Still the end product is one usable Photo blog at which to store all the photos I’ve ever taken. Which is a surprisingly large number; I think I’m eventually going to have more than 200, covering more than 5 years. Surprised how much of the time since I left uni is actually recorded in one way or another.

(Thanks to Tasha for webhosting advice. I’m going to see if I can get my current ISP to increase my site space allocation and if not I think I’ll be transferring to the same host as her.)

Celebration Time
Monday, July 21, 2003 07:07 p.m.

Mr. Stomp had a job interview at Heathrow on Friday and heard today that he got the job. This means he'll be moving out by November.
^_______________________________________________^

Reviews, Transhumanism and Boring News
Tuesday, July 15, 2003 10:41 p.m.

First of all, and most importantly, congratulations to Tasha on her result: a 2:1 ^____^

News is thin today so it’s going to be mostly a review blog, what little I have is at the end. Despite that it’s still an excessively long entry, need to get the hang of brevity I think.

JT asked at lunch whether I fancied seeing Whale Rider and having nothing better to do I agreed. Most of the reviews I’d read had suggested it was a worthy but dull film but when I went back to my office to write-up the announcement to see if anyone else wanted to go I read Ebert’s review, the first paragraph of which is:

"Whale Rider" arrives in theaters already proven as one of the great audience-grabbers of recent years. It won the audience awards as the most popular film at both the Toronto and Sundance film festivals, played to standing ovations, left audiences in tears. I recite these facts right at the top of this review because I fear you might make a hasty judgment that you don't want to see a movie about a 12-year-old Maori girl who dreams of becoming the chief of her people. Sounds too ethnic, uplifting and feminist, right?

Given that quality of review I have little to add except to say that I think he was being a tad too generous. Not a bad little film but not the masterpiece that that would lead you to expect.

My other reason for not wanting to go into too much detail about the film is that I missed part of it (the comedy bit according to JT!) due to a major fit of coughing. Since the weather is hot the train system is inevitably collapsing. Today’s example was my catching a train running 45 minutes late which spent 10 minutes waiting 500m from Oxford station’s platform while sweat poured off me in such amounts that my eyebrows were quickly overwhelmed. I don’t recommend watching films after a lot of hard peddling in 30 degree heat >_<

Other review for the night is a quick mention of “Transmetropolitan: the New Scum”. A comic by Warren Ellis, I’d seen a lot of positive comments about it scattered around the net. On the other hand I’d picked it up a couple of times at the library and found I had little interest in a comic about a gonzo journalist. However, when I did finally succumb I found that it was, unexpectedly, a near-future sci-fi piece - a sort of updated cyberpunk feel. The “Transmetropolitan” of the title appears to be an oblique reference to transhumanism (I feel like adding a digression about transhumanism so more on that later).

The plot of the graphic novel I picked up, the first collected volume of the comic, is then – the freelance journalist, Spider Jerusalem, is digging dirt during the election of the next President of the US of A. And there’s plenty of dirty to dig since the frontrunner had his chief aide assassinated to ride the resulting (Diana-like) wave of sympathy, while his incumbent opponent in so corrupt that he resembles a mafia don more than a politician. (The look and tone of the first candidate is very Boss Smiley, is there some late 90s piece of zeitgeist I’m missing?)

The thinness of the plot is fairly inconsequential however since the main energy of the comic comes from the character interactions and the subtley strange world in which they take place. So to pare this review down to its bare essentials: comic about a gonzo journalist? *yawn* comic about a gonzo journalist in a world of ubiquitous nanotechnology *yummy*

A Digression
Here’s a link to the FAQ of a site about transhumanism, but it’s both wordy and worthy so I’ll summarise a little myself. The basic idea of transhumanism is that in the near future advances in nanotechnology, genetics and artificial intelligence (AI) will be applied to humans resulting in something that will be more than (or least more capable in many ways) than human.

As a device in science-fiction stories this is excellent, it’s a relatively easy way of producing something more alien than a man with a Cornish-pasty stuck to his forehead and yet clearly rooted in humanity and thus at least mostly understandable. Good examples include most of Greg Egan’s output and tangentially the science-fiction output of Iain M. Banks.

On the other hand as an actual philosophy or guide to how to live it’s pretty ropey. For starters it isn’t actually possible yet, if ever, and techno-utopianism already has a bad track record with regard to blindness to unintended consequences.

Anyway as I’m seriously running out of energy after today’s heat, cycling and last nights lack of sleep I’ll admit to my own sneaking sympathies for transhumanism. Like determinism it’s much more wrong than right but I can’t help inclining toward it.

Warning: Boring Maths Ahead
Very slow going with the stupid graphics code today. Managed to solve yesterday’s problem with figuring out which part of the terminator was sunrise and which sunset quickly when I had some fresh ideas. Then immediately found that the terminator wasn’t aligned correctly with the sun >_< Several hours later found out through trial and error that setting the right ascension to almost zero solved it; too tired to actually figure out why. Then proceeded to waste even more time with the bleeding obvious transform required to correctly rotate the final Earth. All the difficult (except they weren’t) problems are now solved so I just need to know what PR want the final animation to look like now.

Blog then Bed
Monday, July 14, 2003 10:56 p.m.

Still have that previous Charlie’s Angels blog entry to tidy up, but hey, press on into the shining future leaving the detritus of the past behind. Despite it’s length this entry is just as scrappy since it’s late and I can’t be bothered tidying and pruning it.

Thursday went to a play put on by an amateur company that a number of my colleagues are in; CJD in one of the principal roles. Play was ‘Arcadia’ by Tom Stoppard, an English manor mystery of a sort. A very Stoppard play in the way in which a number of related themes and topical subjects tied together with a lot of wordplay. First half was a bit weighed down by all the exposition required but I thought the second half motored quite well (JT thought the exact opposite). The plot is split between two times though it all takes place in one room of a country house. In the first time period an off-stage Lord Byron is visiting, though the focus of the play is on a tutor and his brilliant student. The second time period is roughly modern and focuses on two English literature scholars investigating the manor and the authors that lived there.

Got the arrangements for the US finalised on Friday. Proved a real struggle since my supervisor delegated all the arrangements to me along with a budget that was a little slim to the task. Several hours of searching meant that I eventually managed to pare things back to only 30% over budget. But that isn’t my problem – my problem is that I’ve got to make arrangements for the 3 weeks after the conference in which I’m going to explore America. Life is hard!

Met up with Liz in Oxford on Saturday after filling a bag with guidebooks for America from the Oxford Central Library :D Then we went down to Christchurch Meadow to enjoy the glorious weather, stopping off at the Exam School to see if Liz’s results had been posted. The top sheet on which here results might have been (but it turns out weren’t) had been torn out leaving her on tenterhooks a little longer. Sitting by the shady banks of the Thames and chatting while punts and little ducklings float by is a very pleasant way to spend a Saturday.

Went to Edamame for dinner where we were joined by Eisuke. First time I’ve had bad service there, though I’m sure it was only because the waitress serving us was so new she wasn’t familiar with their quite small menu. Then we headed back to my place for ice-cream and videos. Liz chomped down on Rocket lollies, Eisuke and I wolfed down Solero ice-cream and we all watched Futurama and Scrapped Princess.

No housemates that weekend so I got a small lie-in, only spoiled by the bells of the church across the road. Managed to snore through the first 10 minutes but couldn’t sustain it for the last 5. Big event of that day was the work BBQ at LW’s in Radley. Missed the hourly train so I had to take the bus, which led to my big adventure (read problem) of the day. Got off the bus, delivered my share of the sweets, said my hellos, found I’d dropped my wallet >_< Not good, not good at all.

Got a lift into Abingdon where I’d just missed the bus, but the helpful driver of an X3 got in touch with and found that the wallet had been handed in by a passenger. A bit more confusion and crossed signals in recovering the wallet but I had it back intact and as full as when I dropped within two hours. Once that palaver was over with proved a very enjoyable meal. Weather was, if anything, even better than the previous day and company was good. Left a bit early to go back to Oxford, although I didn’t think at the time I was leaving at all early. At least one of my colleagues (SJ) didn’t make it in today due to the after effects of one too many glasses of wine.

Reason I left a little early was to meet with Eisuke and Liz for an outdoor performance of Cressida and Troilus. Rather spoiled by the fact that I’d gotten the times mixed up and so I arrived back in Oxford after it started. Made the best of it by getting some Chinese takeaway and watching ‘Brotherhood of the Wolf’. So amazingly unsubtle that I’d picked up on most of the slash *by myself* the first time I saw it. For those who haven’t seen it it’s a French pre-Revolution murder mystery kung-fu horror.

(Additionally the visiting French students have departed after spending the weekend at a Welsh Eisteddfod with Mr Stomp. Quite liked them, and really liked there crepes which shall be, shallowly, missed)

Today was wholly unexciting, spent most of the day struggling with the extremely simple maths required to produce a terminator. Most of the way there, all I need to do is figure out with longitude is sunrise and which is sunset (and probably a fault with the arctic).

Could do better...
Friday, July 11, 2003 12:02 a.m.

I’m beginning to understand why blogs so frequently go so long between updates. I am in the, probably more usual that anticipated, position of being able to blame my audience. If you didn’t keep talking to me I’d blog more >_< (^_^)

To follow-up my previous entry I should say that my colleagues’ band was perfectly reasonable if nothing special. Entirely covers except for one original song; that sone was a leftover from the writer’s time in a punk-band so it rather stuck out and unfortunately it’s now a chase of good lyrics let down by a poor tune.

I was initially put in charge of the video camera that had been lent out to record the event, but a careful (and realistic) study of ignorance meant that it was put in the charge of someone more competent than me before I’d even finished setting up the tripod! Unfortunately there now apparently exists a video of me badly setting up a camera.

Went to Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle on Tuesday night with Lizzu and a bunch of my colleagues. I feel her review didn’t pay full tribute to its tawdry glory. It was funny, it was action-packed, it was appalling :D

Spent tonight at the new play CJD’s theatre group are putting on – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. At this point I’ve been to at least a half-dozen of their plays but this is the first time I’ve been at one which actually managed to combine a good script with some good acting.

Scrappy entry but I didn’t want to leave it any longer in silence, the power of the internet will allow me to make it more interesting in editing anyway!

Bile and Vitriol
Sunday, July 6, 2003 09:31 a.m.

I think I’ve already mentioned my hated housemate, well this posting is going to be one long rant about the halfwit so don’t read if you don’t want to see some hate. >_< It also occurs to me that this is innately the kind of rant that doesn’t communicate very well since none of the complaints either individually or collectively sounds so bad.

Ever since my second year at university I’ve lived in shared accommodation and I’ve always hated one of my housemates. This is an invariant fact of life and a personal character flaw. My current hated housemate, Mr. Stomp for the purposes of this posting, is however unusual in that I think I would hate him even without that. He is, for example, the only person I can think of that I consciously look down on as being significantly less intelligent than myself. I try to minimise contact with him in order to avoid the constant burble of low-grade obvious observations and inane small talk that streams from his mouth.

Just avoiding his physical presence however isn’t enough to keep me out of his malign influence. Mr. Stomp is fat (and heavy) and appears to be a little deaf. Allied to this is are his habits of coming home and napping till it’s prime-time on TV and of getting up early on weekends. Mr. Stomp moves through the house like a herd of elephants; so the sum total of these irritations is no hope of early nights or lie-ins and almost permanent sleep deprivation.

One thing that does fill my black heart with unwholesome glee however is the fact that he is a Christian. I don’t mean that in the sense that he is a religious person who believes in Christ, oh no, I mean it in the sense that his whole social life seems to revolve around it. He spends his time with a group of people who face an insurmountable extra barrier, aside from manners and their Britishness, against telling him where to shove his lard-filled body. Sometimes the schadenfruede is all that keeps me going.

In other news, my missing French housemate’s cousin and her friend are staying in her room for the next two weeks. They’re English is overall poorer than I would have expected young French people to have. This may account for why they are going to a Christian rock festival in Milton Keynes with my hated housemate. A Christian rock festival in his company, topped and tailed with him in a car – what a joyful time that sounds like.

Now in a piece of cosmic irony I’m off to a gig by my colleagues band at “Wantage Rocks”.

Wednesday, July 2, 2003 08:05 p.m.

Boring day in boring meetings so, instead of boring news, a quote from the book wot I is readin':

"I half-swan, half-staggered ashore with what I thought was the red ensign of the Union, & planted it most firmly on the beach & claimed the soil of the vast nation that spread out before me in the name of the glorious union that the ensign above me signified. But when I dropped my salute & proudly looked upwards, I saw fluttering what proved to be a yellowed sheet soiled with long clouds from Lieutenant Bower’s languid afternoons with the Samoan princess Lalla-Rookh.

I received seven years for theft of personal property, a further fourteen years for insubordination & twenty-eight years on top of that for mockery of the crown."

Wednesday, July 2, 2003 12:38 a.m.

This blog entry written on the plane home from Dublin. I’ve spent a bit of time over the last few years vacillating over where home is, but I think at this point it’s fairly clear that Oxford has edged into pole position. That said not a bad few days at home, though the boredom was beginning to creep up on me towards the end.

Spent a very pleasant morning yesterday watching cheesy television with my brother and sister, an afternoon unsuccessfully fiddling with networking with my brother and a dull evening reading. (The Man from Uncle actually appears to have been better than I remembered :D)

Today did a bit of a tourist jaunt around Dublin. One of my colleagues went to Dublin for a holiday a few weeks ago and before leaving asked me for advice about what to see and do there. I’m afraid all she got from me was a goldfish impression!

Rectified my ignorance a bit by visiting Trinity College and Dublin Castle today. Been to Trinity before but got a bit more history and context from my parents who were students there. Obvious from the names of people, buildings and events just how similar to the Oxford (and Cambridge Colleges) it must have been. Like them it’s right in the heart of the city though considerably bigger in scale than any one of the Oxford colleges.

My mother did some book shopping so I’ll soon see how much she enjoys “The Athenian Mysteries”. A brief review: A detective novel set in ancient Athens amongst the students at Plato’s Academy. A stunning opening culminating in one of the most virtuoso pieces of writing I have ever read about 50 pages in. Unfortunately, the novel can’t sustain it and proceeds to fall apart into an interesting twist and unsatisfactory ending. Still I recommended it to an English Lit student who liked it so it can’t have been that bad.

The tour of Dublin Castle was a classic for all the wrong reasons since our guide was given to malapropisms, mispronunciations and outright historical inaccuracies. It’s a bit cruel to criticise her for telling us about the “voiceroys” of Ireland, but I think such facts as Red Hugh O’Neill (died 16th Century) waging war with Queen Victoria and Brian Boru, last High King of Ireland, fighting at the Battle of the Boyne are fair game. It does make me wonder how many other guided tours where I knew less of the history were quite so fantastical.

Now that I’m back in the UK I should probably try and rein in my appetite – whenever I’m home in Ireland (use of home here in direct contradiction with above :S) I can’t seem to help stuffing myself almost continuously. Today was particularly bad since I took my parents to the Japanese restaurant Wagamama for lunch, before coming home to a hearty meal of burgers and chips.

Monday, June 30, 2003 01:38 a.m.

I always intended this blog to hold reviews of the things I’ve seen or read so below this news/diary entry are two book reviews. I haven’t written a review since school and unfortunately these read like that, hopefully I’ll improve with practice. ^_^;;; Grit your teeth and stiffen your upper lips for a review of the film Dolls later in the week.

Despite my mother’s admonitions earlier in the week I arrived home bone tired. My mother and sister didn’t get home from work till later in the day so I spent the afternoon with my brother and my first time meeting his girlfriend Claire. (She seemed perfectly nice, but I didn’t really get a chance to speak with her enough to get more of an impression than that. She did however apparently get into anime through Gundam Wing and German Sailor Moon!)

Went out in the evening to an Italian restaurant to celebrate my sister’s 18th birthday, actually the week before. Tiredness was really beginning to catch-up with me at that point so I didn’t manage to contribute to the conversation, and it was on the whole quite low key.

I will take this opportunity however to have a little mini-rant about Italian food. Why is it supposed to be so special? Slap a simple sauce on some pasta and hey presto – a classic Italian meal or to put it another way “Italian food, for when you just can’t be arsed”. Not a patch in my opinion on Japanese, Chinese, Indian or Mexican cuisine.

Sword of the Torturer (Volume 1 of The Book of the New Sun) by Gene Wolfe
Monday, June 30, 2003 01:37 a.m.

Despite the title it’s not a sword and sorcery gorefest, instead it’s the first book republished under Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks imprint. An odd decision since I’d have classified the book as clearly science fiction. Set in a future so distant that the sun is failing and the moon has spiralled closer to the Earth the novel follows the torturer, Severian, of its title. Starting as a apprentice in the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, a fading guild in the Citadel of the enormous city of Nessus.

Banished by his Order to a distant northern city for an act of betrayal, this first volume in the series never leaves the city of Nexus. The writing is strangely lyrical and presented from the Severian’s point of view. However, “it was in this instant of confusion that I realised for the first time that I am in some degree insane.” This vantage is made more omniscient through a framing device in which the novel is actually a memoir written with the aid of the enthroned Severian’s photographic memory.

In structure the novel is oddly disjointed, though it is clear that the narrator will betray his guild and that he will come to rule the city and much of the world, there is very little sense in which the narrative is moving in a clear direction. Instead the story seems to ramble between connected and yet separate vignettes. In part this may be because the author has solved the problem of introducing us to a strange new world by introducing it to us initially through the eyes of a youth and then once he is exiled through the eyes of someone who has experienced little enough of it himself.

Characters other than Severian are fairly thinly drawn, the few female characters in particular seeming to revolve around Severian with very little inner life of their own. Paradoxically, despite this the novel depends on them entirely for the direction it does have. The first half being led by Severian’s love for a noblewoman imprisoned and imminently to be tortured to death and the second to the mysterious shopkeeper Agia. The final passages seem to indicate that the amnesiac Dorcas will play a similar role in the next volume.

The male cast fairs much better. The narrator Severian is an intriguing mixture of innocent abroad and callous killer – a somewhat sympathetic torturer and executioner unfamiliar with the world outside his home. Two of my own favourite characters are the enigmatic playwright Dr. Talos and his companion the giant Baldanders. It’s hard to decide why they seem more real than much of the rest, perhaps it’s simply because they will play a larger role later?

On final accounting then, an interesting book but one which feels very much like the first volume in a series. No sense of conclusion and considerably taken up with introductions. I’d prefer to withhold judgement until I’ve read more books in the New Sun series but on the whole I’m cautiously positive.

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
Monday, June 30, 2003 01:34 a.m.

“Ideas are like people. While in theory they are beautiful naked, in practice all but the fairest fare better clothed.” From “Flores of Pretension” by IF

I’ve never really liked short stories; faced with a short story and a novel of equal quality I know I’ll always subjectively prefer the novel. Short stories don’t have space to build up a narrative (or, less importantly too me, characterisation and a host of other properties). I mention this since it’s the biggest grain of salt you need to take before I reading my opinion of Neil Gaiman’s collection of short stories “Smoke and Mirrors”.

Two major strands seem to link the stories in the anthology. The first is Gaiman’s almost trademark fractured, sideways, and skewed modernisation of fairytales and myths. In these the Holy Grail is bought in a charity shop and the queen tries to save her country from a demonic Snow White. The second strand connecting the stories is how rooted in Gaiman’s life they seem He seems to have taken the idea of “write what you know” to heart to a degree that is surprising in a fantasy author. Often in the first person, these stories deal with an author trying to sell scripts to uncaring film execs or an author who loves sushi or someone who has moved to America and misses England.

So what about the quality? For the most part I didn’t think it was up to the level of Sandman or even American Gods. Dipping into the more subjective level, I find Gaiman at his best the less intimate he is. When dealing with grandest and most ancient of archetypes or with events that turn his imagind world (or your understanding of a tale) upside down his writing crackles. When dealing with the domestic or smallest of magics I often find the stories lack much charge.

In summary then, a few gems but on the whole not his finest.

Saturday, June 28, 2003 06:17 p.m.

On the late departing plane home to Ireland. Always have mixed feelings when I go home these days. Katy was saying how she didn’t really feel that her new house was home yet; I get something similar because all though the house is the same most of the contents have changed since I left for uni. As an example: when I left for university you could see across miles of fields to the tops of the Dublin mountains, now there are miles of new housing estates I don’t even know the names of.

News of the last few days next. I’m going to leave most of what I’ve been up to at work for a separate entry since it’s going to be of interest to exactly me. But suffice it to say things seem to be going well. Despite that it seems unlikely that I’ll have anything ready for the EISCAT workshop. Even the poster looks a little unlikely, which means I may have to go Palo Alto without anything to present. My first time going to an overseas conference without presenting, so guilt ahoy.

I was at work on Thursday so I couldn’t go punting with the Oxford OAV leftovers, but they came to me instead. Whenever people come round I seem to end up showing them the very worst things I have on my drive. Why? I think it’s a kind of blackmail – tell me what you’d actually like to watch or I’ll keep showing you this rubbish. Still this particular time I can blame Laura for starting it since she asked to see Gravion :P

Since I had to be up for work the next day, and pack too, I had to end things a little early. Jo had been kicked out of her college for the night due to some sort of conference and Phinn had missed the last bus back to Wallingford by a couple of hours so they both slept over. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem since my mysteriously absent French housemate still hasn’t returned and the house therefore has a spare room. However, this time one of my other housemates put her friend in their first. >_< So Jo and Phinn ended up sleeping on my floor on the best bedding I could make out of cushions from the couch, pillows stuffed with clothes and all my spare bedding.

I had a perfectly good nights sleep (if a bit short) and I may even have managed to creep out without waking anyone. But when I got back from work, I met Jo and Phinn who had only just met left my house; so it looks like my snoring must have been absolutely thunderous :o

Saturday, June 28, 2003 12:20 a.m.

A very quick entry since I have to be up before 7 tomorrow morning to go to Heathrow and thence to Dublin. I'm planning to write a proper entry for the last two days on the plane. But in brief: two successful days at work and the OAV Oxford Leftovers watching anime and sleeping over.

Wednesday, June 25, 2003 11:36 p.m.

Start my first blog entry with good news: work is sending me to Palo Alto (near San Francisco) for a conference and training school this August. I will thus be visiting the US for the first time ever. With a bit of luck I¡¦ll get to visit (and hopefully commandeer the floors of) my sister in New York and of Katy in San Antonio. Planning (and more worryingly budgeting) has already commenced for my trek across the continent, from sea to shining sea.

In the great tradition of whining to the void on blogs I'll report that until I got the America news I'd spent the week a bit listless and melancholy. Last week was the final week (8th) of the Oxford term and so all the students have gone home. Worse than that, some of them have graduated meaning I'm inevitably going to see less of them. Hopefully they'll keep in touch but it¡¦s not like I'm any good at that myself. :(

I mostly plan to use this blog as recourse against the fact that my memory is quite so poor, so I think I'll just jot down what I did over the last week:

Wednesday I spent wrapping the gifts I had charge of, her box of artbook, her doujinshi and shitajiki and Jo's folio. I really wish I'd thought to take pictures of some of the gifts. It's surprising just how long it can take to wrap presents, I wish that I had learnt how to tie a pretty bow at some point in my life!

Thursday was the last OAV meeting of the year. Met up at KFC before the meeting proper for a pleasant and fatty meal with the Ass no Ryu. A rather quiet OAV meeting on the whole; her promise of violent death to anyone who spoiled one of the many finale episodes and the rather moving end of Escaflowne seemed to shellshock people. After the meeting we went to G&Ds where the presents and cards were distributed. Thanks to Andrew for his work in keeping up a steady flow of secret card signing during the meeting. Eisuke's reaction was either stunned or bewildered upon receiving his Summer Casual Asuka doll! While Jo seemed pleased with her folio edition of "At The Court of the Borgias".

Then round to Tasha's for the rest of the present giving. Since it was Jane's birthday by that point (having past midnight) we gave her her Laguna doujinshi and the shitajiki. The squee emitted when she saw the Laguna doujinshi was absolutely marvelous. ^____^

Gave Tasha her leaving gift from the Ass no Ryu - a set of artbooks (Utena, Laputa and Tokyo Babylon) in a custom made slipcase with Ass no Ryu in kanji on the front and our names on the back. I want Utena artbooks of my own >_<

Friday was Jane's birthday so we went out to the Mongolian Wok. Always middling success for me since combining food into something palatable end product is something I can only manage with careful instructions from a book. (Badly.) Then back to Tasha's place for the last time as a big group. Other blogs have covered it better, but I too can claim to have been at the Great Bottle Battle of '03. Also I got to put candles in the cakes *and* light them. ^_^

Saturday got up late but not late enough. Damn you Mr. Stomp, damn you. Bummed around a bit indoors despite the glorious weather before going to the library, getting home and then heading back into town for a brief visit to Eisuke¡¦s place. I only went round to pick up some blank CDs, honest. But several hours later I arrived home after a complete two player go at one of the Gundam games, a translation of the start of the Valkyrie Profile game and a meal at a Malaysian restaurant. My harddrive and I then went to Tasha's place where I took a copy of all the mp3s she had at that moment. Since about half the mp3s I already had were from her, this means that her musical tastes are almost totally dominant now.

Sunday another slack day in before going into town to drop some photos off to be developed. Will post them later. Went punting for only the second time in my life and with Eisuke available to be observed I actually picked up the knack of it after only sending us right round once. After a meal (mmm Nachos) at the Queen's Lane Coffee House waved goodbye to Tasha for last time as a resident of Oxford :'-( And then went to G&Ds for ice-cream with Liz and Eisuke.

And since then: nothing. Work going surprisingly smoothly despite the fact that my initial enthusiasm for the project has drained away in to simple pigheaded determination to prove *them* wrong. Followed once home by ignoring my housemates and long technical conversations with the newly minted Serial Experiments Lane.

And with the prodding from the Ass for Ryu for the results I will now look into posting this.