January 30, 2004  

nearly five centimetres deep 29 january 2004

Memorable images from the snowstorm which we have just gone through:

• Yesterday, most of the drivers hadn't bothered to remove the snow from the roofs of their cars. It looked just like each of the cars was wearing a jet-white comedy afro wig.
• I got a lift home from work yesterday. The car behind us spun out and drifted badly three times in a 1-mile stretch of road. Now there's a driver who needs to calm down.
• This morning, walking in to work, I saw a driving lesson underway. Puttering along very carefully on the completely iced roads - that's someone getting their "adverse conditions" gong, then.
• There's a lot of snowmen out on Midsummer Common. That's a kind of textual irony, I suppose.
• It took Heather three hours to travel three miles through snow-blocked traffic. I spent much of this time painting skirting boards.

I've just realised that I've used the phrase "jet white" above. Interesting - of course, the original sense of "jet black" is a straightforward comparison: jet is a very, very black form of volcanic glass (much associated with the wee seaside town of Whitby in Yorkshire). Hence, "jet black" = "as black as jet". Growing up, I didn't know this, and assumed it was just an intensifier (much as "literally" is becoming) - thus a "jet engine" was a gert big engine, innit. Ah, linguistic drift. It's jet good!

Platters what we is spinnin' lots at the mo: DJ Tiga's entry in the DJ Kicks series. You remember DJ Tiga - he was half responsible for that cover of "Sunglasses at Night" that was omnipresent about a year and a half ago. Very good mix, managing to combine the stripped back feel of a lot of the contemporary electro scene with a faintly lush tang. Also gets a thumbs up for delivering an electro compilation with very little trace of the group of a dozen or so tracks that were everywhere a few years back (though the cover version of Miss Kittin and The Hacker's "Madame Hollywood" is grand). Worth a listen. Also: Horace Andy's The Document II. Horace Andy is Portishead's DJ, and he knows his funk and hip-hop. A good one to put on at parties where you want to get people moving, once all the James Brown's run out. And have I name-checked Macka B's superlative track Don't Drink Too Much If You Cannot Take It (It Might Be Better If You Smoke Marijuana)? Style.

Reasons to love the internet, #54: free, online fulltext versions of The Frogs by Aristophanes. Oh yes.

January 28, 2004  

solvents in the morning 27 january 2004

As is traditional at this point, we're in frantic nest-building mode. That is, we're finishing off the last of the home renovations, and are about to start acquiring flat-pack baby furniture. That's furniture that comes in a flat pack and is designed for babies, rather than furniture for babies that have some kind of hideous deformity. Anyway, it's all going reasonably well, and looks like my vow that the nursery would be finished by the end of January is well on track. The plan is to knock the nursery off, have a big party, and then get the final bits of furniture. All should be in readiness for a couple of weeks prior to the projected arrival date. Also in preparation for which, I will be giving up alchol as of this Sunday (Feb 1st).

So all through February, I won't be able to have a drink. Fortunately, having finished the DIY, I won't need one.

More specifically, I'm not going to drink from the first of February until either the baby's born or the first of March (whichever's later). Further bulletins as events warrant.

Speaking of DIY... we spent most of the weekend doing the floor in the nursery. This meant that we had to move everything out of the room, so I could sand it down. The only place we could really put it all was in the bedroom. Thus, one bedroom completely crammed with assorted furniture, next to one echoingly empty proto-nursery. That's the top floor. On Friday, some nice lads from Robert Sayle turned up and laid a screed on the kitchen floor, before laying the lino on Monday. This meant we had to move everything out of the kitchen. This was all duly placed into the living room. And lo, we have a weekend where half the house is completely empty (and uninhabitable, due to dust, varnish, or drying screed), and the other half - the half we can actually use, I'd like to point out - is absolutely chock-a-block with stuff. Sufficiently full as to make getting to and from the couch an adventure. It was definitely one of those weekends.

UNKLE: they're like The Cure would have been, if Robert Smith had been really into Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy.

We went to see A Mighty Wind over the weekend. It is indeed mighty fine. Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy are extremely good writers (although sections of the movie looked like improv). Well worth seeing - I didn't know a damn thing about the American folk music revival of the '60s and I still thoroughly enjoyed it. As with Guest and Levy's previous work, the ostensible subject matter is just a background (albeit one with loving references to the source oeuvre) to the characters themselves. All the usual acting ensemble appear, leading to a couple of anxious minutes whenever a new character appears onscreen until you can place which roles you've seen them in before. Damn good stuff, and highly recommended.

January 22, 2004  

get up on it like 21 january 2004

Had one of those days on Friday. Midafternoon, I discovered that after six months of being annoyed that my whizzy, colour-screen, digital camera, personal-organizer style phone (Nokia 3650) doesn't have a vibrate function that, whoops, it does. That'll teach me to not check through every last bloody menu. Somewhat embarrassing there. Then, having needed one for the last three years, I bought a radiator key on the way home. For three years I've been bleeding our radiators by using a set of longnose pliers to grip the screw-end. Now, I at last own the correct tool! I arrived home, and opened my toolbox - to discover an old radiator key in the "damned if I know what this is, but it might come in handy" compartment. Whoops, that must have been lying around the house when we moved in. Ah well - now I've got a backup, anyway.

Along with the radiator keys, I picked up a couple of smoke alarms. This is partially because I've been meaning to for a while, but mainly because of recent familial experiences involving fire (my sister's flat got burnt out when someone lit a fire at the back of the building underneath it). It's amazing how seeing photos of genuine devastation with immediate family members mugging bravely in the middle can make you decide to get everything all safe and nice. Interestingly, a bloke who works for our company was burned out of his house just before Christmas. A collection went around the US offices (he was based over there) to help set him back up. We got an email of thanks the other day, in which he admits that the insurance is actually covering all the losses, but thanking us for the kind contributions. Dearie me.

So Raleigh announce that they're resurrecting the chopper, and everyone goes mad. The sheer nostalgia value seems overwhelming. It's all a little odd to me, as I don't recall the chopper making a big impact on New Zealand (but I could just be a little young). The concept of a bike with ludicrously poor steering, which weighed a ton, and which had a gear shift on the top tube (i.e. perfectly placed to ensure a huge amount of pain in the case of an unexpected genitals/top tube interface) doesn't massively appeal. Anyway, as I've mentioned previously, a number of other manufacturers have been making off-the-peg choppers for years - Phatbritain being a good example of the more exclusive end of the market, and Ridgeback's Thunderbird gives you the same bang at the more reasonably priced end. Or even cheaper, Chunk 666 have a good line in practically free choppers, although the requirement to grow a huge beard and have minimal regard for personal safety could be a drawback.

Heck, Google even have a section for choppers. It's a thriving subculture, I tell you!

Raleigh, eh? How the mighty hath fallen. From the great British bike company to just another mass importer of Taiwanese components. These days, if you want something actually made in Britain you need to go to a small independant (like Orange) or to an actual framebuilder (like Hewitt Cycles). Of course, my last bike purchase was British-designed but Taiwanese-built, then lovingly assembled in my back garden, so I'm on both sides of the fence on this one.

BTW, an update on the Kaffenback: it's running nice and smooth. A few teething problems, due largely to the fact that it's the first bike I've ever put together (one brake cable slightly too short, that sort of thing), but by and large she's running very nice. A good wee runner, I'd have to say. Bags of fun to zip around on the tarmac, although I'm not the speediest thing on two wheels by any stretch of the imagination - any future I've got in cyclesport is probably more at the endurance and long-distance touring end of things, rather than the old 10-mile TT. As a result, I'm planning on replacing the race-orientated rear cassette with something a bit more sympathetic on the lower gears, And I'm still amused to note that Google rates me higher than the manufacturer when doing a search for Kaffenback.

Today's soundtrack is the mighty fine Live at the Matterhorn by Fat Freddy's Drop. I can remember when the Matterhorn was a down-at-heels coffee bar, you know. Anyway, it's damn fine stuff - I've been meaning to get hold of it for a while, and finally my sister gave me a copy of it for Christmas. Result. The music's great, good jazz/dub. Four tracks, average track time somewhere in the region of fifteen to twenty minutes. It's great late-night vibe music (although a bit less appropriate for extended periods on the headphones) - definitely the sort of thing you put on towards the end of a mellow evening with a couple of mates. It'd go on after a bit of Miles Davis, maybe, and before ISDN by the Future Sound of London. Good downtempo groove.

January 15, 2004  

the heavyweight jam 14 january 2004

I had an idea this morning. A perfect solution to the problem of gigantic SUVs, lumbering through traffic like juggernaughts (this being a direct design influence). Obviously, the singlemost important thing on a SUV owner's mind is the good gas mileage. Sorry, turned over two pages at once there - I meant to say, intimidating effect in traffic. While there are some people who have a genuine need for some of the features typical on SUVs (for example, farmers, loggers, accountants who have a 2 acre lifestyle block somewhere out in the countryside who make a point of driving through a few puddles to get some mud on the car on their way back into town on Sunday evening, etc.), I'm not entirely sure that this group accounts for more than 3% of the people who actually use SUVs. Still, we probably shouldn't ban them, becuase there are occasional legitimate uses for the hideous, overpowered, top-heavy bags of shite. I thus propose a simple alternative solution to the problem: require all SUVs to be painted pink. Bright pink. Barbie pink. And new car model names are to be drawn from the vast archive of My Little Pony and Barbie accessories. Oh, you really need all that space (typically less than an estate/station wagon, trivia fans!), power, and menacing grillwork because you need to be able to lug around lots of stuff at once? Then you won't mind having to choose between the Ford Moondancer, the Dodge Blossomforth, or the BMW Flutterbye!

Then we can see who really needs all that space, height and power, eh?

I'm in two minds about what to do about sports cars. On the one hand, they have no obvious purpose on the open road, and are usually driven dangerously. On the other hand, most of the people who buy them are middle-aged men undergoing the male menopause, and presumably these poor souls have to get erections somehow. Then again, I hear there's a chemical solution to that these days, so we're probably better off just banning the damn things.

Ways you know you're getting older, #17: we were sitting in a pub last night, next to a table full of undergrads. I looked over and thought, my god, these are pretty much the sort of people I was hanging out with when I was an undergrad. And then another thought hit me: they're really, really annoying. Self-loathing? Then I realised that they were more like the kind of people that the kind of people I hung out with hung out with, and whom I'd found annoying at the time. The annoyance is not new, merely intensified. Result.

A fair bit of happy baby stuff in the last few days. Heather's spent a lot of time getting poked and prodded (incremental blood tests - the fun!), and we've had a crack at our first ante-natal class. It's true, you know - you do spend the next half hour after the class happily making bitchy remarks about the other class participants. Mind you, we learned many useful things, such as the relative bloodflows to the right and left sides of your body, which fingers it's safe(ish) to clutch in a vice-like grip without fear of breaking them, and the correct huffing pattern to use to prevent hyperventilation (hoo, hoo, ha - also comes in handy if you're planning on doing overdubs for kung fu movies). Actually, the class was very handy and we did learn quite a lot of stuff, so I shouldn't be flippant. Recommended, although it did feel slightly like we were attending a giant tutorial at the University for the Heavily Pregnant (including splitting off into discussion groups!).

January 09, 2004  

and the red light was my mind 8 january 2004

We had the 32 week scan the other day [picture (20kb)]. The Next Generation is a good wee size, and looks to be in good fettle. It's certainly booting away, and seems quite active (although it was yawning during the scan). Impressive how much it's changed since the 14 week scan: then, the whole body was vaguely peanut-shaped and fit on one screen. Now, it's very definitely human, and only individual bits at a time can be screened. Most cool, and not long now till it starts the World Tour, so to speak.

I occasionally scribble prospective baby names on my scratch pad at work. I also use this for work, funnily enough, so I have the odd moment where I think to myself "Now why did I want to call the baby 'Defrag'? Or 'End Panels!'?"

Not quite a New Year's Resolution, but I've decided to give up alochol for February. OK, so February's the shortest month of the year, but it's a leap year, so it's 29 days, OK? It'll be interesting to see how it goes. I suspect that some of my drinking is simple habit, like having a pint when I get home because that's just what I do. One of the things about drinking is just that it's always a good idea to conduct occasional checks to see how discommoded you are if you can't do it. It's a good early warning system: if you can "give it up any time you like", have a crack for a month and see what happens. It ain't gonna hurt - although I do anticipate it being pretty annoying, given that most social interaction in the UK involves alcohol. Still, it'll give me a chance to get reacquainted with lassi at the curry house rather than Kingfisher.

So I've been listening to a few DJ mixes from the last couple of years, and I've noticed a certain degree of commonality. Certain tunes keep popping up. Specifically, I've noticed the following DJs who've slipped Marlena Shaw's "California Soul" into their DJ mixes.

• DJ Shadow
• Cut Chemist
• The Beta Band
• David Holmes

So about a year or two back, suddenly everyone decided to include the same piece of back catalog soul, eh?

Whoops, when I mentioned the Future Sound of London sampling Predator the other day, I of course meant the FSOL side project Amorphous Androgynous (first track on the Tales of the Ephidrina album). Sorry about the confusion there, ambient techno fans.

What we've been listening to recently: The Avalanches DJ sets from the Breezeblock (Radio 1 show). Stunning stuff - eclectic as all hell, and beautifully done. At one point they mix The Beatles (Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, pitchshifted slightly), Pujo (Got Myself a Good Man), and Dee-Lite (Groove is in the Heart). Highly recommended. Or in the second breezeblock mix, where they mix traditional belly-dancing music in with Missy Elliott (Get Your Freak On). Surprisingly effective. Other bands we're spending time with at the moment: Evolution Control Committee, The Beta Band, Public Enemy.

January 05, 2004  

clam before the strum 4 january 2004

So 2004, eh? A bit older, possibly slightly wiser, and certainly staring down the barrel of a lot more responsibility. Should be a good one. We're certainly looking forward with a keenly-honed anticipation to what the year will bring. And the stork, of course.

Storks probably shouldn't be confused with herons. I've seen a few herons in the wild (on the Cam near Horningsea, or in various small streams in the Cambridgeshire countryside while on training rides). They're most impressive, but quite skittish birds. Gert long beaks on 'em. The bane of ornamental fishkeepers across the UK - there's a substantial market in heron-scaring gadgetry, to keep them away from your ponds. Better to spend £50 on some device to scare the beggars away, rather than to have 'em belly up to your pond and consume £2000 worth of ornamental koi.

Whoops, digression there.

We've had a very good Christmas break. Terribly restful, it were; also fairly productive. Half the time we spent lying around, yawning, watching telly, etc. The other half we spent stripping, prepping, and painting the kitchen. This was a more involved project than it sounds, as the end result of knocking two rooms together and relocating a door and window was a wide variety of surfaces in various condition. Lots of stripping wallpaper, washing various surfaces, sandpapering out protrusions, pollyfilling bumps (quite a few of these), etc. Fortunately, the kitchen was entirely usable throughout the process. Mind you, if it had been completely out of bounds, we'd have knocked it on the head a bit faster. As was, the painting and decorating quietly expanded to take up all the available time. Still, the kitchen is now more or less finished - a little more work from the builder (just a tiny bit, basically), and the flooring to go down. Rock. We tended to follow a slight variation on the standard "work with the sunlight" schedule used by builders around the world. The variation mainly concerned getting up at 10am, as we're on holiday, right? Current dusk means that we've been tending to get about 5 hours of work done a day, which in practice meant one coat of any odd paints (skirting boards, radiators, etc) or one to two of vinyl emulsion. I love vinyl emulsion. Dry enough for a recoat in 2-4 hours, touch dry in one, and it just washes straight off you. I've painted a number of things in my life (various redecorations, summer jobs, etc), and I'm a big fan of vinyl emulsions. New innovation this time was a mini-roller - basically, just like a normal roller, except made out of sponge rather than flock pile, and with a sponge end. This provided excellent control, made the various nooks and crannies (we had lots) relatively straightforward to paint, and the sponge end allowed me to paint into corners very easily. It replaced a brush for most of the edging and cornerwork.

Funny thing, really - the nature of painting with normal rollers is such that the main body of the painting is extremely quick. Certainly so when compared to the time it takes to do the edging, various bits of prep, etc. At one point, Heather managed to knock off a wall in the time it took me to carefully apply masking tape to the rest of the kitchen. Impressive stuff. Still, it's always the way with decorating - the prep takes 80% of the time, and the actual decorating flies right by. This also means that you tend to have a project that's showing very little visible improvement day by day (the visual difference between a stripped wall that's been sugar-soaped and one that's then been lightly sanded to key the paint in isn't much), and which then changes tremendously very quickly in the final stages of the project. That's the bit I love.

Most favorite bit of decorating: putting the final coat on, and then standing back to admire the results. Least favorite: cleaning oil-based paint out of brushes, with turps. My knuckles are raw, I tell you.

So Christmas was good. We ended up getting each other various useful home gadgets - bread maker, food processor, etc. We must be becoming adults, eh? Mind you, I've been asking for various tools for the last few Christmases and birthdays, so I'm fairly sure that maturity set in a while back. Result. And we've been merrily making bread and smoothies (panem et smoothium? the 00's method of keeping the populace amused while it all burns down around our ears?) like mad pirates.

Do mad pirates drink smoothies?

How about mildly annoyed ones?

I was watching Predator on telly last night, and burst out laughing about halfway through. Not because of the now badly dated special effects, mind, but because I realised that there's an audio sequence there that the Future Sound of London sample wholesale. Heh. And here was me thinking it was them doing some sonic wizardry - is it my arse, it's from a mid 80's Arnie movie. Tch!

Other big bit of news is that I passed my driving test. Result. Learning to drive had been one of my New Years' resolutions last year, and I nailed the bugger on the 30th December. I got it on the second time. The first test was earlier in December, and I got knocked back for what the examiner perceived as a slightly heavy foot on the brake and for skidding it slightly on my emergency stop (BSM car didn't have ABS). Annoyed, I went off and practised a bit, working on getting my braking a bit more progressive and a bit less skiddy on the emergency variant. I managed to get a re-test pretty much as soon as I was legally able, and retook it on the 30th. No worries, did it without a prob (though was a bit nervous at the start and thus a bit jerky in first until I calmed down). The marking system the UK uses allows you to accumulate a certain number of minor faults - for example, not checking a mirror when you should, turning a bit wide, slightly sloppy gear changes, etc - without failing. Any major mistakes, or too many minors (or consistently making the same minor mistake) will get you failed. I got a few minors, and was amused to note that I'd been dinged both for being a bit hesitant and for not being hesitant enough at various points. Got tested on the emergency stop again, without a problem this time. And, as the man says (the man in this case being Frank Trubshaw, who I'd heartily recommend as a driving instructor in Cambridge), a pass is a pass, so we're home and dry.

Having sniffed at being failed on the emergency stop the first time, and rather surprised to get it on the retest (I'd heard that it's one of the rarer manuevres on the test), I'd been grumbling about how seldom I'd get to use it - right up until some idiot ran a red light on my second day of actual driving and I had to do an emergency stop to avoid ramming the bugger. Needless to say, I'm now glad of the practice. I've thus been hopping in the car for an hour or so each day and driving around the place. It's good fun, though I'm still going to use the bike as primary transport as much as possible. Still, it's grand being able to ferry Heather around the place. I'm considering getting a chauffer's cap, a la Parker from Thunderbirds.

No, really.

Did I mention that we've got a nodding kiwi in the car? It rocks. Well, nods.

What we've been listening to over Christmas: since we've been decorating, mainly spoken word stuff. Such as the audio book version of Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett (loaned to us by a mate, and great for listening to during prep) and the BBC Audio tapes of I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again. It's damn good stuff, you know.

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