Random musings of a child progeny
We didn’t quite have the Sigur Rós soundtrack or see things happening quite so fast last week when Juliet and I ventured down to Galloway Forest Park but we did have a blanket and a bottle of champagne which more than made up for it.
If you missed the Perseids, have a look at what you missed – handily condensed into just over one minute.
Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.
I ventured out on my bike over the weekend for the first time in ages. Nothing too strenuous – a short climb on the road to the canal and an eventual 16km loop back home.
There is a well-established hierarchy on the road: truck drivers hate cars, car drivers hate cyclists and cyclists hate pedestrians. It works the other way along the chain too. Where does this stem from? Sheer embittered experience.
Within 50 meters of leaving the flat, two pedestrians started to cross the road – against the suggestion from the signal – and walked right in front of me. I gave them a good shout and they thankfully managed to jump back before I ploughed into them. Further along my way on up to the canal a woman behind the wheel of a BMW blithely ignored the protocol of giving way to your right at a roundabout and pulled straight out. Thankfully my brakes were up to the task asked of them.
It has been quite a while since I last rode along the Union canal towpath and in the meantime some helpful soul has erected signs asking cyclists to slow down to a near walking pace. These signs have now been officially replaced by British Waterways. Apparently I’m one of the few cyclists who sound their bell when approaching pedestrians. Of course, this makes absolutely no bloody difference if those walking in front of me are listening to their iPods at full volume1.
Everyone, for the love of Pete, please, please bloody well pay attention to those around you and obey the rules – no matter what your mode of transportation.
1 I’m thinking of strapping one of these to my top tube to replace my bell.
I’m a little disappointed at how seemingly everything is being marketed as belonging to a zero-sum situation at the moment.
The main example of this mantra at the moment is the flawed argument that HTML5 will kill flash. Nonsense. There is a situation for either one.
Replacing the single-use (albeit massively entrenched) scenario of video does not sound the death knell for Flash.
Now that the clocks have changed again most people are assuming that it’s summer and we should all be wearing shorts and sunglasses. Realistically, this heralds springtime more than anything else and rain – even snow – shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone.
That said, I have entered the “summer Nev” phase and shaved off my beard.
I think that the beard had served its purpose over the winter months and I was in distinct danger of becoming almost fashionable.
The clocks changed last night and we’re now in British Summer Time. I can never remember which way they change and I find the old aide-mémoire “spring forward, fall back” (which I’ve just had to search for on Google) effectively useless. I’ve fallen forward just as many times as I have fallen back – if not more – and my natural tendency would always be to spring back away from something in trepidation rather than springing towards it.
Besides, most of my time-pieces change themselves now which leads me to wander around looking confused for a few hours until I see independent verification of the actual time.
“He who dies with the most toys is, nonetheless, still dead.”
- Riposte to the No Fear T-shirts of the mid-90s
After four years of student life and nigh on a decade living as a bachelor, I’ve just taken a huge step and moved into a new flat with my girlfriend. To say that I’m excited would be an understatement!
Neither of us have moved in with the other. Reasons of space aside, neutral territory just makes better sense in terms of nullifying any perceived views of encroachment.
I’m finding it sort of depressing having seen my worldly possessions reduced to a stack of cardboard boxes. That said, you can’t pack the ethereal. There is a smidgen of guilt that I didn’t save more money during the time I was living for a lot less. I keep having to remind myself that in that time I not only paid off my overdraft and student loans but I was also fortunate enough to manage an awesome three months on a worldwide trip of a lifetime.
From time-to-time I (and I guess everybody else) does ponder the “what ifs” of life. What if I hadn’t gone to university? What if I hadn’t gone on that trip? What if I hadn’t talked to that person in that bar? Obviously none of us will ever know but this I do know: I am fantastically happy having taken the path I have through life so far – be it through active choice, fate or happy coincidence.
To paraphrase Calvin, following the traditional British route of saving hard for a deposit, taking out a hefty mortgage and obsessing about being a homeowner may be “the done thing” by this stage in my life but I certainly wouldn’t be the person I am with the experiences that I now have had I gone down that path.
What is it with the demand for ‘realistic’ movies all of a sudden? Case in point: Roman Polanski’s new film The Ghost.
Sidney Perkowitz suggests that every film should be allowed to ask us to suspend our disbelief on one occasion only. Currently, movies fly seemingly permanently in the face of what would actually happen in reality. Misguided attempts to recreate or re-enact what we’ve seen on screen notwithstanding, what’s the harm in letting the special effects department use it’s collective imagination to entertain us for 90 minutes? Have we become so entranced and convinced by Hollywood cataclysmic disaster movies that NASA is forced to assure us that the world won’t end in 2012?
It would appear so.
The reason that we have science-fiction and not science-fact is simply one of entertainment: one is and the other one usually isn’t. Watching a hacker craft a buffer overflow exploit – while more realistic and non-offending to computer professionals – isn’t exactly going to make for edge-of-the-seat thrills.
One of my old flatmates used to scoff at virtually every movie at least once, using phrases like “Pfft! As if!” or “Well that’d never happen” to the point where I stopped going to the cinema with him.
‘Realistic’ exists already: it’s called a documentary.
I wrongly assume that my “normal” friends (i.e. non-geeks) see most of what I encounter on the Internet. I forget that they’re unlikely to spend nigh on ten hours a day connected. They are probably not subscribed to Gruber nor Kottke and neither do they typically use Twitter.
If you’re not drinking from the firehose then perhaps it isn’t unsurprising that some things will pass you by. I am by no means attempting to claim that I see everything worth seeing on the Internet every single day. To do so would be impossible – even the professionals miss a lot of things first time around.
However, that’s not to say that my friends who largely live offline aren’t interested in some of the wonderful stuff that’s out there. Most won’t “get” XKCD but when I received an email last week pointing me toward the epic Two Gentlemen of Lebowski that I first saw at the start of the year, I realised that it’s my responsibility to bring these things to the fore in my role as “the geeky one” of the group.
To this end, I plan on using my Tumblr account to share interesting clips and articles that I encounter and keep this here blog for longer pieces and the occasional rant.
No sooner do I write a post about making yourself a target for robbery than along comes a dedicated domain to highlight online privacy and the dangers on broadcasting your location to all and sundry: pleaserobme.com.
Despite being an avid user, personally I find the Foursquare tweets hugely annoying. I also only accept friend requests on the service from people I actually know – mind you, I do exactly the same on Facebook: Amber MacArthur notwithstanding, I’ve had a beer with every single one of the people in my friend list.
I did dally with geotagging my tweets for a while. This allowed me (or anyone else for that matter) to paste my Twitter RSS feed into a Google maps search in order to see where I was tweeting from – just out of sheer curiosity you understand. The results were pretty much as I expected: various pubs, the office and home. I’ve since stopped geotagging and have deleted all of the data – which, to their credit, Twitter make extremely easy to do.
I do wonder though: exactly how much more likely are you to be a victim of burglary if you broadcast your location? How many criminals are sat just watching Twitter on their (invariably stolen) iPhone, just waiting for someone nearby to announce via Foursquare that they’ve left their house? Isn’t it far likelier that an opportunistic thief will see you leave home and jimmy your back door open or smash a window?
No, not me. I would very seriously recommend that you don’t attempt robbing me.
That phrase is what I think must go through every bag-snatchers stupid little mind when they see people – and I’m talking almost exclusively about women – carrying their bags with the handles in the crook of their arm, their forearm conveniently positioned horizontally to allow the bag to be slipped off with great ease as the thief runs past.
Aren’t people advised to not make it easy for criminals any more?
