because i ain't shaving on saturday November 29, 2007  

One of the recurring themes of Movember is that women hate it. But... It would be churlish to complain about what the guys are doing, because that's defined by the event organisers, and it would be particularly churlish to demand that they stop, because it's raising money for a good cause. So what we have here is blokes doing something that they've secretly wanted to do but didn't want to publically admit and which their partners don't like, in the name of charity. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

"Jack, what the hell are you doing?"
"I should have thought that was pretty obvious, dear."
"And what the hell are you watching? What's the reason for this?"
"It's Pornuary, dear. I'm being sponsored $1 for every fifteen minutes of porn I watch."
"WHAT?"
"Well, after the success of Movember and then Wanktember, it seemed the next logical step... Remember, dear, it's for charity! Now can you stand out of the way of the telly and pass those tissues, please?"

i'm in training for next year November 23, 2007  

There's a funny phenomenon with mountain biking. When you're hurtling down a trail, and something unexpected happens or you hit a dodgy bit of turf, your natural impulse is to hit the brakes and lose some speed. This is often a bad idea. Braking puts more pressure on the contact areas of your tyres, and often causes you to lose traction. For instance, if you lose traction on your rear wheel and feel the back end sliding sideways, braking is a sure-fire way to lock the back wheel up and make the skid worse - while just letting the brakes go means that your forward momentum is likely to carry you out of the skid and on down the trail. Similarly, if you hit a patch of gravel with your front wheel, hitting the brakes turns a dodgy control moment into a front wheel skid; which is to say, usually into a crash. It's counterintuitive that the best way to get out of some sticky situations is just to let go of the brakes, but once you learn to avoid panic and just roll with it, things work more smoothly. Momentum is your friend, and can carry you over and through more than you'd think.

This isn't some crypto-hippy tract about learning to live with rapid change or anything - "Let go of the brakes to get control of your life", "Your instinctive reaction to control is only making things worse", etc - it's a serious point about controlling a mountain bike downhill. Really, try it.

This isn't such a big point going uphill. Uphill, the main thing is to try to keep enough weight over your rear wheel that you don't spin out. Try and get a life-affirming maxim out of that, snooty.

A big good luck to everyone riding Taupo tomorrow, especially since the forecast is pretty dire. Still wish I was riding it, but between the accomodation problems, having a young baby in the house, and having to ride herd on Rebecca, neither the training nor the trip were particularly practicable. So I'll ring up on Sunday and book my accomodation for next year, and we'll all be good.

I'll say this for Movember - the streets of the CBD at lunch look like a page out of the sex offenders register. Also, about half the blokes doing it are going for the full Lemmy from Motorhead/Hulk Hogan style handlebar moustache.

breezeblock of pain November 22, 2007  

Had a cracker of a weekend. The weather really came to the party, with beautiful sunshine everywhere. Saturday was pretty mellow, involving a family walk along the Tinakori Ridgeline track - on a good (i.e. fine and not windy) day it's an absolute blinder, with panoramic views across most of the city's main suburbs. Absolutely lovely. Rebecca got to climb up a couple of interesting banks, we had a few sweeties, and we met several nice dogs. On the whole, a nice afternoon out, and highly recommended.

Sunday, Heather was off in Nelson playing a gig with the Klezmer Rebs. So I had the girls, and we sepnt most of the day up at my mum's house. Rebecca had stayed overnight with mum anyway - Maggie and I turned up at around 11am to find Rebecca running around naked outside, playing in a paddling pool while mum did some gardening. Over the course of the day I mowed various bits of lawn, woggled the compost heap, and cleaned out the fishpond. The fishpond was an interesting job: it involved carefully draining the pond via bucket. The pond is fairly small, only about 300l, so this didn't actually take too long. There are a couple of medium-sized goldfish (shubunkins) in the pond, so I was being pretty careful about them. I caught the big one easily in the bucket, then carefully transferred it to an isolation tank. Well, an isolation bucket. Well, the bucket that I wasn't bailing out the pond with. As more water came out, we started to disturb the thick layer of green detritus on the bottom of the pond, making the water opaque. I carefully bailed out the buckets of water, watching as I poured them out on the garden to ensure that the remaining fish didn't go with them. Clearly this was not scrupulous enough: at the end, we had an inch of water at the bottom of the pond, and no second fish. Whoops! A thorough check of the garden finally yielded the fish (shubunkins camoflage well under agapanthus, it turns out), who'd spent at least ten minutes out of the pond at this point. Astonishingly, the little sucker was still alive; once transferred to the holding bucket he showed absolutely no ill effects from his prolonged sojourn in the herbaceous border. He was promptly renamed "Lucky" (because "You'd have been luckier not to be dumped in the garden at all, but under the circumstances we reckon you were lucky to be rescued in time" is too long to say). Still, glad to say that both fish were reinstalled in a newly cleaned and refurbished (some new aquatic plants) pond.

Not so good a time on Monday, when I realised that the reason that the front lawn was growing so well was that one of the outside pipes was backing up. In the interconnected manner of pipes, it turned out that a complex system of blockages and backed-up pipes meant that we had some informal greywater recycling going on onto the front lawn - not to mention occasional blackwater, which is rather nasty whichever way you look at it and certainly not something we want the kids playing in. As is the way with plumbers, one was called in and immediately converted a mild worry about a leaking pipe to a definite worry about a health hazard and a very large bill. Still, it's done, and we once again have proper drainage and a lush lawn.

The funniest thing I've seen for a while would have to be the "death of Top Gear" - a commuter race across central London, in rush hour, between a bicycle, a speedboat, public transport, and a big grunty car. I'm sure based on the fact that I'm mentioning it, you can figure out the result, but it's worth watching just to watch Richard Hammond demonstrate a mastery of the urban cyclist's mantra. Unfortunately, as Top Gear is broadcast before the watershed, they've had to bleep most of it out, but you can still make out the odd non-obscenity.

I've found someone in NZ who breeds tortoises. And because they're not native, you don't need a permit from MAF to keep them. Life is good.

Currently reading: The Seven Pillers of Wisdom, by T E Lawrence. Somehow I'd expected the stuff about gay sex in the desert to be a bit further in than page 2.

Heather's father constantly embarasses her by relating a story about the first time she saw an ocarina. She picked it up, looked at it, and started to play flawlessly. Whenever he tells this, she looks embarassed and mutters "It was just like a recorder, only a different shape". I suspect that I now have a similar story: yesterday, Rebecca and Heather were talking. Heather mentioned something about the number 40 and reflexively said "40 - that's two twenties, isn't it?" in that whole 'if we immerse you in knowledge for long enough some of it's bound to stick' way that you tend do as a parent. Rebecca looked thoughtful and then said "Yes, mummy, and 30 is one and a half twenties."

So I'm pretty proud about that.

Even if when I tried to get her to re-enact it once I got home, she claimed that 30 was "one hundred twenties".

surprisingly painful November 16, 2007  

How useful are bicycles, and bicycle stuff? So useful that the British nuclear arsenal was activated by a bicycle lock. None of this namby-pamby yankee style control codes, two-man activation system: turn the key, drop The Bomb. This is particularly hilarious (or terrifying, take your pick) when you think back and remember that whole "able to open a bike lock with a ball point pen" controversy of a few years ago. Sadly, no word on which model of bike lock was used, though I'll bet Kryptonite's marketing people want a word with the RAF.

That's probably the most insane thing I've read all week, by the way.

As per Heather's recent themes, a couple of random statements from Rebecca. Firstly, after staring deep into my eyes while I wasn't wearing my glasses:

Daddy, your green eyes look like the earth.

When asked why she'd been standing in front of the washbasin, about to wash her hands, for five minutes:

I'm just thinking about the moon.

Did the Wellington Corporate Challenge the other day. It's a 5k fun run/walk along the waterfront. Being firmly convinced of the cult of the amateur in sport, I consider training to basically be cheating. Hence my preparation for this gruelling event had consisted of breaking into a jog for about 200m last week, so I decided to take it a bit easy. This meant powerwalking the first 2k, then jogging for a bit to see how I go. So I ended up running the last 3k, which was a bit of a surprise as I didn't think I had it in me. Good fun at the end, with free beers and barbie from work; pretty sore in the legs the morning after, though (turns out that running uses different muscles from cycling - who knew?).

There are several schools of thought as regards bike maintenance.

• No maintenance - "Yeah, the brakes used to work. Don't any more though. Don't know why."
• Obsessive maintenance - "Pass me the toothbrush, there's some dirt on chainlinks 35 through 39."
• Percussive maintenance - "It's stuck! Whack it wiv an 'ammer!"

I've been through all of those and am now resting in a state of what Stephen Jay Gould nicknamed "punk eek"; not a band of mice with safety pins through their tails, but punctuated equilibrium. That's where you get things more or less working, then don't do ay maintenance until something falls off or wears out. Then, while you're changing the brake pads anyway, you wash the bike down, clean the chain, change the front gear cable, install a new bike computer, and for an encore you completely re-index the rear gears. Then you just ride the damn thing until something else goes wrong, and a new set of radical maintenance happens. It saves a lot of time in the evenings, but does mean that you occasionally have to spend an entire Sunday morning fettling.

I am currently in excruciating pain after ripping half my left little toenail off last night.

Loads of Booshy goodness at the moment. The first season just finished over here on C4, and they're just sloshing straight on into the second season next week. Meanwhile, Season 3 is showing in the UK and is available to watch online. It's all good.

i'll give you laid back November 07, 2007  

Way, way back in the mid '90s, I was into the computers. I'd been BBS'ing since the late '80s, I had an account on the old CityNet run by WCC, I was down with the UseNet groups massive. When I got to Vic in 1994, I got an account on SANS and ran with it. One of the UseNet groups I used to read avidly was rec.arts.bodyart - the "body art", i.e. mainly tattooing and piercing, newsgroup. On that, I heard about an interesting resource that was something called a "web page". Through a bit of finagling, I managed to get access to my friend Mike's student access account, running Netscape, and view the website. The site was the early version of the Body Modification Ezine [NSFW]; the image I remember most clearly was one of someone with huge stretched earlobes - so big that one photo actually showed someone else standing behind him with a hand through one of his earlobes. It made an impression on me.

Later on, as rec.arts.bodyart simmered away into the standard UseNet gloop of trolling, bitching, cliquery and bite-the-newbie, BME took up the burden. The guy who ran it, Shannon Larratt, was a bit odd, but very passionate about body modification in all its forms. I was never an obsessive reader or a serious member of the community - I contributed one or two book reviews, for which I wasn't credited - but I kept an eye on it. Over the years, it grew into the largest and most active body modification site on the web. Of course, most of the action was in the tattooing and piercing side of things, but Shannon always concentrated on body modification in all forms, including cutting, branding, suspensions, amputation, nullification, gender-switching, etc. Much of this was too hardcore for many people - myself included. Some of it made you think "No, you do have serious psychiatric issues and need help" when you read people's accounts of what they'd done. But it was always worth a look.

In later days, the main activity has been on the blog - modblog, an excellent feed of interesting photos and experiences. Good photos, lively discussion, NSFW.

Then I noticed that things hadn't been updated on Modblog. Nor had BME. Then I heard some vague mutterings about "trouble". Then I did a bit of digging. And discovered that the site had spectacularly imploded. It's absolutely impossible to find out what's actually happening - various legal gag orders are in place - but the gist of it seems to be that Shannon, who started the site, was forced out by a putsch of the commercial and legal staff (including his ex-wife, who ran the business side of things). A number of people have lept to his defence, and he's started a new site (BodyTwo). There are a variety of allegations around, including variously bad parenting, alcoholism, serious drug abuse, and domestic assault. Who the heck knows what's going on? No-one, really: anyone with actual knowledge is covered by a gag order. That hasn't stopped people taking sides; this being the internet, everyone's leaping in to defend people they often haven't met, based on their experiences of them online. It's kind of odd watching someone defend someone else's parenting skills based on the person's blogging about what they do with their kid.

I guess the rambling point here – apart from hey, people jump to conclusions on the internet – is that I’m a bit sad that it looks like the first site that I ever saw on this big wide interweb, the killer app that at the time made me think “Hey, I need to get some more of this Netscape action!”, seems to have gone down in flames. Ach well – I guess we’re all growing up.

One interesting side effect of this has been that I’ve been drooling like a madman at exactly how much cheap rural land you can get in Canada. Someone mentioned getting some land in Canada, moving to the backblocks and going homesteading. Then they linked to Dignam, who exist to sell cheap chunks of rural land. I’d love a hundred or so acres of forest somewhere, and that’s precisely the sort of thing these guys flog off for cheap. Read their site and drool. Yes, I’ve checked, there’s no NZ equivalent. Closest seems to be laying down 250k for a hunk of forest land near Dannevirke. Funny thing about NZ – we just don’t have the huge swathes of basically uninhabited land that somewhere like the US or Canada does. Still, I can keep an eye out and see about picking up a decent sphagnum bog somewhere down on the West Coast...

And to whoever owns the black SUV often parked in Stout St outside the law school, with the personal license plate KLF: class.

Spent most of the day at the Technical Communicators Association of NZ biennial conference. Lots of interesting stuff on UI design, website design for diverse audiences, and why RoboHelp has stopped sucking quite so much. Rock!

Is it just me, or is steampunk a load of pretentious twaddle?

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