Planet LBW

My mad experiment in CPAN mirrors has grown a couple of new tentacles. Previously it could be a perl-X.Y.Z-specific mirror, such as the CP5.6.2AN, or an OS-specific mirror such as the cpMSWin32an. Now it can combine the two such as in the CP5.8.8-irixAN and all of those can optionally be combined with a date/time to only include stuff that was already on the CPAN as at that time, such as at the CP2000AN.

Why do this? Let's assume that you have a large complex application which uses lots of stuff from the CPAN, and depends on Elk version 1.009 and ListOfDogs version 5.1, and will break with any later version of Elk (or of ListOfDogs). You get a feature request from a user, and think "ah-ha, there's a module for that", and so you go to install Some::Module. Unfortunately, the latest version of Some::Module depends on Some::Other::Module which in turn needs Another::Module which needs Elk 1.234, so your CPAN client merrily upgrades Elk, breaking everything. Doom and Disaster. Having a CPAN "mirror" nailed to the date of the last release of Elk and ListOfDogs that works for you will save you from pain, suffering, and the Dark Side. Either you'll get older versions that Just Work, or you'll get nothing, and nothing is far better than breaking everything!

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In August 2010 I read the following books:

1. The Burning Land, by Bernard Cornwell - Meh: 2/5

There's not much to distinguish this from the previous four volumes in this series. In fact, apart from the geographic location there's nothing to distinguish it. Bleh.

2. Flash Forward, by Robert J. Sawyer - Meh: 2/5

There's some interesting ideas here, and the makings of a great story - actually, of more than one great story - if only the author could settle on one of them. Unfortunately he doesn't, instead writing a lot about not very much happening. And then to make matters worse, as well as ignoring the particularly interesting sub-plots, the ending feels terribly rushed and really rather derivative. Not a very good book at all.

3. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand - Rubbish: 1/5

I couldn't finish this book, it's that bad. I gave up about a fifth of the way through. It's at least five times longer than it needs to be, littered with overly wordy internal monologues. The characters are entirely one-dimensional and all are caricatures - even Rand's heroes who are supposed to demonstrate the rightness of her philosophy are laughable one-dimensional cartoon villains. In fact, the book reads rather like I would expect it to if it were written by a friendless nerd who was watched rather too much Star Trek and wishes people were a bit more like Spock. Rand clearly doesn't understand humanity, or if she does, it is utterly hidden by her incompetence as a writer.

4. New Model Army, by Adam Roberts - Good: 3/5

When this book is good, it's very very good, and when it's bad it's awful. Which is unfortunate, because there's a great premise here, even if a little silly. It takes the idea of the "wisdom of crowds" that is so fashionable these days amongst wiki-fiddlers and takes it to the extreme, and actually tells an entertaining and engaging tale. Unfortunately, the tale is interrupted a few times by rather dull philosophising on the nature of love. And then, at the end, it just turns into nonsensical babble instead of, well, instead of ending the damned story. Sure, we're meant to understand from it that Pantegral has somehow taken over and democratised the whole of Europe, but there's that nagging "somehow". It's a shame, because this could have been really good. I really liked this a lot, but was terribly let down by the end, and because of that I can't recommend it.

Thinking about it, this post is going to be slightly ironical. I've not written to this blog for the best part of 9 months, and the topic of this post is about writing. Funny, no?

I blog a lot about the joys of being an accountant, and many of the rants tend to be fairly repetitive – I am well aware of this.

Today at work there were some good moments and some bad moments. But overall, there was a heck of a lot of funny moments – not funny “ha ha” but more of case of me being highly amused by others.

Today is the last business day of the month which means I had a shit load of journal entries to do for the August close. I managed to do most of them, in preparation for tomorrow’s variance analysis meeting with the Director and CFO. We are also gearing up for our quarterly reforecast. I had done my homework, meeting with the IT Director to discuss IT spend (both capital and overhead). As most of my co-workers are pampered and tend to have numbers fed to them, instead of them actually making the effort to do any forecasting analysis, I managed to determine for each of the 7 entities where there needs to be some adjustments made to the reforecasts. As an excellent co-worker I crunched the numbers and fed it all to the others – all in a pretty table, fitting onto a single page.

I have my forecast numbers ready for my meeting later this week. I also have documented my rationale for my numbers. One of my co-workers, who I have blogged about not having much ability with Excel, asked me to reformat an Excel-Magnitude spreadsheet for her affiliate. Excel-Magnitude is an odd little add-on to Excel used for pulling data from Cartesis – our reporting tool. To get the report to work one needs to know which affiliate code to type in. When I was asking “what do you mean you don’t know your own affiliate code” my manager walked into my office, hearing me say that rather loudly to my co-worker. I am quite sure there will be some eyebrows raised — and this is one of the many funnies today for me. The other will be how she needs to explain herself to senior management — the fact that she has to get another co-worker to do her analysis, and prepare her spreadsheets.

Another funny stems from a problem we’ve been having with our bank account; to be blunt, it has been compromised and needs to be closed. The end result is that there is no cheque run this week — no one is getting paid. Oh the sheer panic, spreading like lice through the Agency. Today I had a question “you mean only the invoices submitted this week, right? The stuff from last will be paid, I am assuming.” I had to reassure the fellow that he is quite wrong and that no one is getting a single penny this week.

I am not looking forward to tomorrow’s variance analysis meeting. The Agency has been spending wildly again, and having to explain that the twits have spent $20K on taxis yet again in a single month … it’s sheer lunacy. No one will take the creative peeps to task and tell them to stop spending like “Mad Men“.

The worst bit? I am still feeling quite feverish. I have been gulping down vitamin pills like a crack addict. I need to survive another 48hrs and then I can drag my sorry ass to the ER and hopefully get admitted for the weekend — so they could pump me full of delicious antibiotics. The abdominal pain is getting worse by the hour, and that is being staved off by mega doses of pain killers.

As promised, I've now watched the hateful new Star Wars films so I can compare them to the originals while they're still fresh in my memory.

- Rubbish: 1/5 The Phantom Menace isn't as bad as I remember, but it's still pretty goddamned awful. There is no acting in it whatsoever, there's irritating expository dialogue (delivered woodenly, of course), there's whole sections that could be cut out or at least severely curtailed. And all the CGI just makes me cross. There is a good film in there, wanting to get out, and it might have been able to get out if the actors had had a chance to act and if there had been a good dialogue editor. But then, having weird and wonderful beasties and lots of stunt flying makes it easier to sell toys and video games.

- Meh: 2/5 The second prequel, Attack of the Clones is just as ineptly directed and shot. There are a few moments of acting - Hayden Christensen momentarily portrays a wonderfully spoilt and sulky teenager, for instance - but otherwise all the same criticisms apply to this film as to its predecessor. And you can then add a whole load of tired cliches, in particular during the oh-so-derivative rolling-in-a-meadow scene. And as for selling toys and video games - Lucas couldn't even be bothered to shoot the video game footage seperately, it seems. Much of the CGI is of such poor quality that it only belongs in a video game and not in a film. When it comes to special effects, the rule is "Do, or do not. There is no try". Again, there's the potential for a reasonable film in there, shamefully spoilt by how the damned thing was made.

- Meh: 2/5 And finally Revenge Of The Sith - by far the strongest of the three prequels. The special effects are still short-bus special: many are spectacular, but the rendering especially of the clone troopers is inept. It surely can't have been beyond Lucas's budget to have a few costumes made and use them at least for those in the foreground and interacting with the other characters! Again, it smacks of being a video game in some of the long action sequences. The script and much of the delivery is still terribly wooden, in particular Palpatine's speech in which he takes dictatorial power just isn't written very well. There are, again, moments of acting. Ian McDiarmid really stands out, and Christensen manages to act for a few brief moments. Even so, much of the dialogue is still delivered woodenly, because of over-use of green-screen techniques.

To summarise, none of these films are as awful as I had first thought when I saw them a few years back. They're still badly made, but if you can look beyond that you can feel that there is good in them. The common failing is over-use of technology. Lucas supposedly held off from making these films for twenty years to wait for technology to catch up and let him "realise his vision". Trouble is, much of his "vision" could have been done back when the original trilogy was made. Not all of it, sure, but almost all of it could have been, and many of the bits that would have been tricky are peripheral to the plot. The character of General Grievous, for example, in Revenge of the Sith, was clearly designed with CGI in mind, but could have been re-written as a more conventially shaped character and portrayed by a bloke in prosthetics and costume - or could have been written out and replaced with more of Anakin being turned to the Dark side, which in the film did happen rather suddenly and all at once.

I went out for a friend’s birthday celebration last night, and there was my Cat. Along with several other repropates

My getting sick last year has freaked them out. Cat, when she got home from KG, received a message from Stephanie that I’m okay and not in hospital. That is so sweet, and yet I feel like I am being stalked – but in a loving fashion.

Seems my rather liberal usage of Facebook is the barometer they use to determine if I’m okay. If there hasn’t been an update it means I’m in hospital and it’s time to worry. I did reassure them that if I am not at Facebook they are to check Sunnybrook, as that is where I will be 99% of the time if I’m ill.

Mr Squirrel was also taken to task for not letting peeps know I was sick last year. So he’s under orders that he is to post on my FB wall if I am ill .. so these lovely stalkerish friends can keep dibs on me.

On a happy note, Cat noticed my weight loss and is looking forward to “inheriting” some of my Holy Clothing outfits. What love.

- Very good: 4/5 Star Wars

- Good: 3/5 The Empire Strikes Back

- Excellent: 5/5 Return of the Jedi

I've just re-watched all three Star Wars films. The original versions, not the "Special Editions". These were the Laserdisc releases, transferred to DVD by a nice man.

Now, Mr. Juan Lemon says that I hate the three modern imposters because I'm watching childrens' films with jaded cynical adult eyes, whereas the originals, while also being childrens' films, are part of my childhood and so I forgive them. Having watched them again, I don't think he's right. The originals are much better films than the imposters full stop.

The scripts are better (even the slightly ropey second one); while lots of the dialogue is cheesy, true, it's well-delivered and is actually funny; the editing is first class; the acting is - well, it's acting, instead of people woodenly delivering their lines. I'm sure that the fact that there were people in the monkey-suits and actual sets instead of nothing but a green screen and the aliens would be CGIed in later has a lot to do with that. The models used for the space combat sequences remind us all how far CGI still has to go: the battle between the two fleets near the end of Return Of The Jedi has yet to be bettered by spotty oiks with expensive PCs. Most of all, the films all tell a reasonably coherent story and there is real character development.

That's not to say that the films are perfect, of course. All have their flaws. Star Wars is perhaps a little "bitty", The Empire Strikes Back, the weakest of the three, doesn't have a particularly satisfactory conclusion, and Return Of The Jedi has Ewoks (which were apparently going to be Wookies originally but were changed to make a somewhat dark film dealing with issues of good vs evil and redemption more kiddy-friendly). But they're still better than the later abominations, which seem to exist solely to show off Industrial Light and Magic's clever computer tech and to milk the toy market.

But now, I suppose, to be fair to the Abominations, I do have to watch them again. I'm not looking forward to that.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my iPhone 3GS from OS 3.something to the shiny new iOS 4. There are two significant changes as far as I'm concerned from the 3.x series, and two minor changes that are worth mentioning, plus a bunch of stupid irrelevant crap like being able to have background images (in fact I think you have to have a background image now). I wouldn't have bothered upgrading, except that an app that I use quite a lot required a newer version of the OS.

First the minor changes. Their mail client can now talk to my mail server without shitting in its pants. It's still a crappy user interface for email though - pretty much unusable IMO, so I don't use it, which is why it's only half a change. But hey, it's an improvement. It's an improvement from "actively hostile malware" to "unusable rubbish". And hidden away in a dark corner is an option to disable screen rotation. I had that already because I'd jailbroken, but it's nice to have it in the core OS instead of having to install yet another third-party hack.

Then we get to two big features which I actually had previously, but only because I'd jailbroken my phone. They're probably the two big ones that people jailbroke for in the past, although as we'll see there are still good reasons for jailbreaking.

On version 3, you pretty much needed to jailbreak and install CategoriesSB (or the free but slower Categories), because otherwise you have no real way of organising your applications - and when you have forty or so apps installed, you really do need some organisation lest you spend all your time hunting back and forth through eleventy million screens of icons. iOS 4 adds folders, which work pretty much identically to CategoriesSB, only they're far easier to manage and set up in the first place.

The other biggy for which tons of people jailbroke the older OS was Backgrounder, which allowed you to put an application into the background. This is very important for things like when you're running an ssh client but need to look something up in another application - maybe using the web browser, or looking up a password in something like Keeper. It's also useful for applications which take a fair amount of time to start up, or which don't maintain their state properly when you exit. Apple didn't implement this, using the excuses that it would eat battery and make your phone run slow. To a certain extent that's true - there were a few times when I had several apps running in the background and my phone ran slowly. Mind you the only way I could really tell it was slow was because all the eye-candy animations got a bit jerky, which doesn't matter. And yes, if I were to background something like the Magnatune app and leave it streaming music over 3G, then it would chew through the battery pretty quickly. But you know what? I chose to do that, knowing what would happen. The benefits outweighed the costs. Apple should have let their users make that choice themselves, maybe warning about the costs when the user turned on that optional feature.

So, now the iPhone has multitasking that is officially blessed by Apple. And unfortunately Apple have not done a very good job of it. Instead of me choosing to background particular applications only when I want to, it seems that just about every application uses this feature, even apps that have no use for it whatsoever. For instance, my address book goes into the background instead of exiting. Video games do too. And boy does this have its effects! Remember that Apple were so concerned about battery life and performance? Well, battery life with iOS 4 is considerably worse than before. It's common now for me to leave home in the morning with a full battery and get home with only 20-something %, where before that was very rare indeed. And with far more apps chuntering away in the background (because they all just do it all the time instead of me choosing to do it with just one or two apps for only a few minutes) there really is a performance hit. Apple fucked this up bigtime, and should have just either bought Backgrounder or cloned it.

So Apple get, out of two available full points and two available half points ... one and a half points.

There are still some important misfeatures and missing features which really should have been fixed way back in version 2, if not earlier.

• still no album shuffle in the "iPod" application;
• there's still no (official) way to install your own SMS ringtones;
• status bar still doesn't show things like whether you're in silent mode or have any missed calls (for this you need to install Status Notifier Fix after jailbreaking, although it still won't show whether you're in silent mode because Apple broke something between OS 3 and 4);
• too much wasted space on the screen. Compare the unhacked and hacked images on the right. Five Icon Dock and Five Column Springboard are essential;
• access to common settings is still too slow and fiddly, made faster by jailbreaking and installing SBSettings. And now that iOS 4's retarded multitasking is such a battery hog, it's even more important to be able to easily turn on and off other battery hogs like Wifi and Bluetooth only when needed;
• still no to-do list. WTF? Thankfully, there's Toodledo, but having this built-in is pretty much mandatory for something that's meant to work as a PDA as well as a phone.

Another tasting at The Whisky Exchange, another spirit I didn't know much about. My gin drinking to date has been almost entirely in the form of gin and tonic, with occasional cocktails. This evening was a tasting of eight different gins, plus some cocktails.

Interestingly, while you usually get much the same crowd of people at TWE's tastings - they're mostly whisky drinkers, but plenty of them also came along to the armagnac and rum tastings and some to the tequila tasting - I didn't recognise anyone at this gin tasting. They missed out on a good evening. What's more, it was a green evening: gin has fewer food miles than whisky, as much of what we tried was made in or very near London - Jensen are based in Bermondsey, Sipsmith in Hammersmith, Beefeater in Kennington, and Plymouth in, errm, Plymouth.

The evening started with some twat with an "amusing" topper perched on his head mumbling to himself while pretending to mix a drink. He had all the usual stupid cocktail bar rituals, including pouring his ingredients from as high up as possible and looked like a right 'tard. He looked even more like a 'tard because he wasn't pouring anything at all: there was no liquid in his bottles. Thankfully, he fucked off pretty quickly and we were all given a GnT jelly cube, made with (I think) Hendricks gin, Battersea Quinine Cordial (which appears to not be available for the general public, boo, hiss) and elderflower syrup. This was lovely and had even captured the fizz of a good GnT.

There were two presenters. One was a foreign chappy whose name I forget, who talked a bit about the history of gin and seemed to get excited about the history of cocktails. The second, and more interesting, was Desmond Payne, the master distiller at Beefeater. This wasn't just a Beefeater evening though, and Desmond very knowledgeably took us through ...

1. - Good: 3/5 Beefeater: nose, citrus, grass and licquorice, becoming overpoweringly citrus with water. The taste was as the nose but with a dash of salt and bitterness from the juniper, becoming sweeter with water.
2. - Very good: 4/5 Tanqueray: floral nose with some juniper coming through, floral alone after adding water. The taste fiery, bitter and licquorice, less bitter with water.
3. - Very good: 4/5 Jensen: not much nose other than alcohol, becoming slightly floral with water. Tasting sweet and floral with just a hint of bitterness. This should on no account be drunk neat as it's rubbish without water.
4. - Excellent: 5/5 209: an American gin, the nose is floral, blackcurranty, citrus and a spice market - predominantly cardamom, with water becoming all cardomom and ginger with a dash of turmeric. The taste is very very cardamom, with ginger and sweetness. Add water and the juniper comes through. I was shocked that I liked this, as I normally can't stand cardamom. My drinking buddy James was the opposite: he normally loves cardamom but couldn't stand this gin. Weirdo. I bought a bottle.
5. - Meh: 2/5 Jensen "Old Tom": "Old Tom" is an older style of gin that Jensen have re-recreated. The nose is of turmeric and tamarind, becoming a little sweet with water. The taste is woody with burning paper and bitter chocolate, with water becoming pepper and paper. Very interesting, but I didn't like it.
6. - Good: 3/5 Plymouth: the nose is citrus and floral, the taste sweet and lemony. Not significantly different with water, becoming perhaps a dash oily.
7. - Excellent: 5/5 Sipsmith: a citrus, licquorice and almond nose which doesn't change much with water. The taste strongly juniper with sweet spices - Christmas in a glass! This is dangerously drinkable with a splash of water, and I bought a bottle.
8. - Very good: 4/5 Beefeater 24: this unusually uses tea as one of the botanicals. The nose is warm and sweet, the taste of spices and grapefruit, and it doesn't change much with water.

And then on to the cocktails. We had an excellent Tanqueray GnT and one not quite so good (but still very good) made with Beefeater 24. The feeling in the room was overwhelmingly that lime is better than lemon for a GnT, but Desmond Payne disagrees.

Unfortunately the rest of the cocktails were a bit rubbish. We started with two sweet martinis, supposedly made in the style of the original martinis before they became dry. The cocktail historian chap said that they became dry because tastes changed - so, given that that's what modern tastes are, why make sweet martinis? Both were interesting (one made with 209, one with Jensen) but too sweet to enjoy.

Then we had a "margarite" made with Plymouth gin, which appears to be a sweet martini with a cherry in it. The drink was revolting, but once removed the cherry was very nice. Then a sweet martini made with Old Tom. I didn't like the sweet martinis made with decent gin, and this was, predictably, even worse. It was revolting, tasting like gin that had had an aniseed twist dissolved in it and mixed with cherry syrup. Old Tom is rubbish, but it's still better on its own.

Finally, two negronis, made with Beefeater 24 and Sipsmiths. Both tasted overwhelmingly of bergamot oil. They differed slightly, the one made with Beefeater being "fucking horrible", the Sipsmiths cocktail being "nasty", according to my notes.

So, Executive Summary time: gin can be really nice. If you're going to mix it with anything, make a GnT. Anything else is a SIN.

Like most of you, I'm sure, I've tried tequila in the past, and not liked it. But then I'd only had it while drunk, so when the opportunity came up to try a few different tequilas at another of The Whisky Exchange's tastings at Vinopolis a coupla months ago, I thought I'd give the drink another go ...

1. Tapatio blanco: "blanco" tequilas are unaged - or at most allowed to sit for a few days. I was surprised that this was pretty drinkable for what is basically a raw spirit that's been watered down to 40%, with lots of flavour. It was very vegetal, and I presume that that was the agave coming through.
2. Tapatio reposado: "reposado" tequilas have sat for a few months in wooden barrels. This specimen had spent 6 months in oak, and was bottled at 38%. The nose was dusty, the taste of sweet cinnamon and peppercorns. Very good indeed, and I bought a bottle
3. Tapatio anejo: "anejos" have been aged for longer, this one spending between 15 and 18 months in wood. While that doesn't sound like much, the Mexican climate means that the wood works much harder than it would in the main spirit-producing parts of Europe - in this respect it's perhaps similar to the accelerated aging that Amrut's Indian whiskies get. Compared to the reposado, the dustiness has gone, leaving a much sweeter nose. The taste has mellowed, with the peppercorns turning into bell pepper.
4. Chinaco blanco: this was less sweet than the Tapatio blanco, and is the other tequila that I purchased on the night.
5. Chinaco reposado: aged for 11 months in oak, the nose is of turpentine and cherries. it's been aged in barrels that previously contained Scotch, and it tastes of it - quite sweet and vanilla-ish, somewhat syrupy, a bit like some grain whiskies. It was nice, but the whisky overwhelmed the agave.
6. Chinaco anejo: aged for 30 months, this has a nose of grass and turpentine, and tastes dry and dusty, with less agave and pepper beginning to come through. Unfortunately, while it's not sweet it has a syrupy mouthfeel while also being drying. The mouthfeel makes this one a no-no.
7. Tapatio extra anejo: back to Tapatio, this has spent between 3 and 5 years in new French oak, which makes it very old for a tequila. The nose is of old roses, vanilla, and white papper, the taste is smooth with violets, orange and heather-honey, leaving the mouth feeling quite dry.

We were also greeted with a Margarita (but not with that fucking horrible salt on the rim of the glass) made with Tapatio blanco. Very nice.

I'm a terrible slacker, I went to this tasting back in February and have only just now got round to writing up my notes. BAD ME.

It's largely due to Glenfiddich's marketing back in the 1970s and onwards that single malt whisky is now so popular. Unfortunately, while their standard bottling may have been interesting back then compared to the crappy blended whiskies that dominated the shelves at the time, it's rubbish by modern standards, but it kept selling mostly because it was cheap. I believe that they've discontinued it. It certainly wasn't part of this tasting, at which we sampled seven different bottlings as well as a new-make spirit bottled straight from the still.

1. New make spirit: the nose was cherries, pears and paint, the taste pure unadulterated evil. With water the nose was sweeter, the taste still evil.
2. 7yo: nose of paint and fruit, taste (with water) was sweeeet with apricot and pepper. Surprisingly good.
3. 12yo, 1997: the nose was similar to that of the new make - cherries and paint, with the pears replaced by orange peel. The taste - mint. With water it dies completely. This should definitely be drunk unwatered.
4. 15yo, 1994 "Solera": this is an odd beast. After being aged in the normal way (which permits the age statement - in whisky, the age statement is that of the youngest spirit in the bottle, which may contain much older spirit as well, as the distillery blends several casks together to make each batch of the final product), casks are then blended together Solera-style in a large vat. When spirit is drawn off from the vat and bottled (the vat never being fully emptied) it is topped up with more casks. This is, I believe, unique amongst whiskies. The resulting product is pretty good, with a nose of fruit cake and honey, tasting os raisins and brandy.
5. 18yo, 1991: nose of apples and brandy, the taste sweet cinnamon. With water it didn't change much, but just became a bit less interesting. This was pretty good, but not great.
6. 21yo, 1988, rum cask finish: this was an excellent whisky. The nose was mellow with leather, beeswax and vanilla. The taste of spice and - predictably - rum. With water some citrus came out too, but it's better without.
7. 30yo, 1979: nose of chocolate and port
8. 30yo, 1976, cask strength, sherry cask finish: this was spectacular but isn't generally available - you might be able to buy it at the distillery if you're lucky. The nose was of dry sherry and honey, the taste replaces the sherry with good tawny port. Doesn't need water despite the strength.

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In July 2010 I read the following books:

1. War in a Stringbag, by Charles Lamb - Very good: 4/5

The part played by the Fleet Air Arm in the second World War is little known, and this very accessible, clearly written autobiography by one of its pilots who served in some of the FAA's most important theatres does a very good job of bringing the FAA to greater attention.

It breaks down broadly into two sections: first, Lamb's time as a Swordfish pilot, predominantly in the Mediterranean theatre; and second, after a clandestine mission to land a spy in Vichy-controlled French North Africa went wrong, his year as an internee of the supposedly-neutral Vichy French regime, during which he and his fellow prisoners were treated badly. In both he shows courage and significant independent thinking. This is then followed by a very short summary of everything that happened between his repatriation and retirement, including his role in the Pacific theatre and in the Royal Navy in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

This is definitely a better biography than Wings on my Sleeve by his fellow FAA flyer, Eric Brown, as it actually contains a narrative story (well, two of them, one after the other, as noted above) whereas Brown's work (which is also worth reading, incidentally) reads more as simply a series of disconnected episodes: it comes close to being just a "shopping list" of planes that he'd flown.

2. Churchill's Cigar, by Stephen McGinty - Good: 3/5

This fairly short book - only 200 pages, with large margins and not-quite double-spaced - consists mostly of rather charming stories of people fawning over Churchill and giving him extravagant gifts. There's little about the man here, or about the war he led us through, and not even all that much about his cigars aside from the fact that he smoked an awful lot of them. Overall, there's little to recommend in this book, although it does make for a short pleasant diversion.

3. The Philosophical Strangler, by Eric Flint - Meh: 2/5

I read this because someone compared it to Pratchett - and, at that, to Pratchett's work 15 or more years ago, when he was still writing new stuff and not just recycling his earlier work. To me, Pratchett really went off the boil after Small Gods and I've not bought much of his stuff since. Of course, I'd take most comparisons to Pratchett-at-his-prime with a hefty pinch of salt, but this was someone whose opinions I trust.

That said, I've read some other Flint, and while some of it was fun (1632 in particular is fun rubbish), shallow writing with little believable development is his trademark. How lucky for me, then, that The Philosophical Strangler, like 1632, is part of the Baen Free Library.

The Philosophical Strangler is supposed to be a single story, and in a sense it is - each page leads to the next, throughout the entire book. But it feels more like a series of humourous fantasy shorts, all revolving around the same two main characters, with the links between them only tenuous at best. A handful of those shorts are pretty good, with one or two being laugh-out-loud funny. But most are no more than average, with a fair number being pretty bad and one being almost unreadable dreck.

If it really were presented as a collection of shorts, with the tweaking of intro and ending that each would then get and the tightening that would come from it, I could just about recommend this, but as it is, I can't. Not even when you can read it online for free.

4. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury - Very good: 4/5

This is another collection of short stories connected by a tenuous theme - they're the stories told by someone's tattoos - but this time it's intended to be a bunch of shorts, and most of them are good, a few are outstanding, only a couple are bad, and none are awful. And three are utterly brilliant. Originally published a couple of zears before Fahrenheit 451, the connections are obvious in two of the stories - two of the best stories at that.

The theme of the man of the title's tattoos provides a nice lead-in to the first story, and the epilogue provides a satisfactory end, but in all honesty those two sections could have been dropped entirely. I'd not be at all surprised to find that the individual stories have also been published independently of them.

The stories are a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, almost all of them character-based, most concentrating on human weaknesses and relationships. The successful ones, however, do have at least some action in them too: it's only the two stinkers in which nothing happens except blathering.

Note that the UK and US editions differ: I read the UK edition, which omits four stories from the US version and adds two others. As it happens, I feel that the two added are amongst the best in the book. The link above is to this edition.

5. Ragamuffin, by Tobias Buckell - Very good: 4/5

After reading Buckell's Crystal Rain a coupla years ago when Tor gave it away as a promo for the newly-released-in-paperback Ragamuffin and just-published Sly Mongoose, and liking it a lot, I finally got round to buying both Ragamuffin and Crystal Rain recently. While Ragamuffin is a sequel, it would also work very well as a stand-alone book. Someone reading it without having also read Crystal Rain won't get quite as much out of it and may miss some details, but would still enjoy it.

Where Crystal Rain was steampunk, Ragamuffin is space opera, chock full of splendidly heroic human freedom-fighterss, dastardly evil aliens (and their human minions), and lots of action. But it also has, like its predecessor, well-rounded people, and a consistent well-thought-out universe for them to inhabit. Definitely worth buying.

6. The Trials of Arthur, by Arthur Pendragon and C. J. Stone - Good: 3/5

As I've written before, "yes, that's really the author's name". Arthur is a neo-druid and a campaigner for the sort of things that unwashed hippies campaign for, and so would normally deserve (and get) my scorn. But throughout this book you get a great sense of honesty and passion, and most importantly that he is an honourable man. I think that I'd like him, that I'd buy him a drink if we ever meet, and that we'd then have a flaming row while we drank our beer.

The book is obviously mostly written by Mr. Stone, who also writes for numerous newspapers and magazines. Thankfully, there's none of that newspapery rubbish here. The writing is unashamedly hagiographical, without (unlike newspapers) trying to pretend to be otherwise. You feel that he is writing from the heart. The style takes a few pages to get used to, but it's an easy, clear read, with a clear sequence of events: just what you want from a biography.

I loved The Wizard of New Zealand's autobiography, and this book will now take pride of place alongside it. It's not great, but it's worth reading, especially if you can pick it up cheap.

7. The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell - Meh: 2/5

Oh god, it's a popular pseudo-historical novel. And it's just as bad as I expected. As is required by law in this genre, Our Hero loses everything while still young, grows to adulthood, meets many important people, and becomes a great hero. By the end, he's saved the day, with a revenge sub-plot left dangling for the no-doubt uncountable sequels. Sorry if I just gave away the entire plot. The history and culture has been, umm, pepped up (OK, it's a load of balls to tell the truth) for dramatic purposes, of course, and as a result we are left with dramatic action, one or two people, and a load of cardboard cutout caricatures.

So this is not a very good book. I wouldn't bother buying it if I were you, but it's good entertainment to get from the library or second-hand, read once, and never think about again.

8. The Pale Horseman, by Bernard Cornwell - Meh: 2/5

Carrying on where the previous book left off, this sequel is just as bad as its predecessor, for all the same reasons. And like its predecessor, it's a good once-off entertainment, not worth paying full price for.

9. Lords of the North, by Bernard Cornwell - Good: 3/5

Again, this follows straight on the heels of its predecessor, but with a key difference: the vast majority of the story is set amongst people and in a land which is not very well known these days and which is very poorly documented in comparison to its prequels. And the story is much improved by it. Now that he's no longer tied to working with real people and doesn't have to force the story down particular paths all the time, Cornwell can give reign to his imagination. A much better book all round. However, it still only gets three stars. If I thought it could stand alone then it might just squeak four, but I don't think it can quite stand up well enough on its own.

10. Sword Song, by Bernard Cornwell - Meh: 2/5

The story now moves back to places and people that are more well-known, although much of the tale has been constructed entirely by Cornwell, with nods here and there to real history. The story isn't much constrained by reality, and so has the potential to be, like the third installment in the series, better than the earlier volumes. Unfortunately, what's made up is rather ridiculous, and has some inconsistencies with what has gone before, by which the book is dragged back down to mediocrity.

11. The Trade of Queens, by Charles Stross - Meh: 2/5

This, the sixth and last installment in the series, suffers from the same problems as the fifth book, and suffers from them in spades. It's very disappointing that such a good series should deteriorate like this. The politicking is still there (although perhaps not as much as the previous volume) but the silliness, culminating in nuclear carpet-bombing, is just so ridiculously over the top as to offend my sensibilities, even allowing for the fact that it's fiction and for dramatic suspension of disbelief.

I almost gave this just one star but it's just about pulled up to two by the fact that it's pretty much required reading if you've already got this far - just be prepared to be disappointed, even if you weren't disappointed (and you should have been) by the previous installment.

The end is somewhat intriguing and sets up more potential sequels, which may be improved by having had the obnoxious feudalism killed off along with all its incomprehensible politicking. There's a few interesting directions in which it could go, depending on which of the loose ends Stross decides to follow up on, if at all - on his blog he says "I'm not ruling out writing more books in that universe — but I'm taking a couple of years of time out first, and if and when go back to there, it'll be with a new story and mostly new characters". Good, it could do with a partial reboot.

The pie has a noble and lauded position in the semiotics of revolutions and political and social commentary. Bill Gates was famously humbled by a cream pie which, not being baked in the revolutionary mould  itself, chose to obey the laws of physics and arced parabolically into the nerdy monopolist.

Many a US President has been saved from the embarrassment of a student pie landing in his kisser by one of his Secret Service pie catchers taking-one-for-the-boss. No surprise then that pies feature large in the protestors of Crusties, pie crusties, at the G20.

The G20 is that periodic gathering of the Illuminati where they plan our control and oppression, and eat some nice cakes. Hardly surprising that that the filth object and seek to protect their paymaster. The bastards.

Huzzah then for you civil liberties lawyers in the vanguards of counter oppression. Hurrah then for Torontonian lawyer Alan Cameron Ward who has just nailed The Man for $5000 in damages for false arrested. In his anxiety to protect a protester he unwisely ran near where police intelligence reports, yes — an oxymoron, indicated a possible pie throwing conspiracy. He was heroically tackled, thrown to the ground and roughly searched for possible exploding Cornish Pasties or fused Lemon-flans. To compound matters they asked him to remove his underwear (Geeklawyer has to admit, sadly, that when he offers to remove his own underwear police usually threaten arrest to him to keep them on).

So remember lawyers: pies have a useful role for democracy but if you know your punters are inclined towards a reckless pie, be prepared and NO running look what happened to JOhn Charles de Menezes.

It was one year ago today, July 17th, that I rang for an ambulance to rush me to hospital – specifically Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where my surgeon is located.

Normally, when I go to the ER I take a taxi as I’m usually mobile enough to get myself into one. But this time round the pain was so excruciating I could barely walk across my livingroom and it took me half an hour to go from my bed to my phone (I live in a tiny apartment, 448 square feet). I managed to ring, and got through dispatch pretty quickly. Told them I am having chest pain, am shivering so hard that I am having a hard time staying upright and my pain was excruciating — radiating all the way around my torso.

While in the ambulance being rushed up to Sunnybrook the paramedic tried to get an IV started, he couldn’t. Luckily got to the ER at Sunnybrook and I was immediately rushed into the acute care section, where 5 nurses were working on me. Seems I had a heart rate of 175bpm, and my blood pressure kept climbing. I was barely getting in enough oxygen, and at one point they put me on 6L/s of pure O2. I had a lot of blood draws — don’t ask, I just remember being poked in my arm, my wrist, my ankles and the tops of my feet. An IV was started up, and I was put into an isolation room in the ER. Urology came down, to assess me, as I am a urology patient. The resident told me that I would be admitted as a urology patient .. I remember at that point feeling relief (not physical, it hurt to move and I was trying my damndest to lay still) with the knowledge that I would be taken care of. Managed to get hold of a telephone and left a message on my parents’ answering machine … a rather pathetic “I’m in the hospital, alone, and I’m scared. Please, someone, come here quick.”

After that it is all blank for me. Seems I was in the ER for two days before I could get a bed in C2 (the urology ward) and in the meanwhile my friends were frantic, not knowing where I was. On the day I took the ambulance Mike was suppose to drop by with some groceries for me, and he knocked on the door but no answer except for the pathetic meows of my cat. He and Tarotcub were trying to get through to my brother, asking if he knew where his sister was. Seems the answering machine went unchecked for nearly 2 days.

When my mom heard the message she rushed to Sunnybrook (my father, at the time, was in Lithuania). She missed me by half an hour. The day my mom was rushing to my side the Medicine Department (a real live “Dr House” team) was called in to look me over. I was under the care of several departments — Urology, as the primary admitting department, Infectious Diseases, Respirology and Medicine. While being checked out I turned blue, vomitted blood, passed out, and stopped breathing. I was rushed to CrCU (Critical Care Unit, one of two ICUs at Sunnybrook.. this one being the truly acute one) and intibated. I was on a ventilator for over a week. I woke up a day after the breathing apparatus was removed.

I woke up with an NG tube, a central line in my neck (IV in my neck) and an ART line in my left wrist (IV in the artery .. seems I had several units of blood for transfusion cos at one point my hemoglobin dropped to about 62).  I was on a little machine constantly taking my vitals — monitoring my heart, oxygen, pulse, blood pressure, temperature. I had some physical therapy that day (don’t ask me which day, all I know is that it was towards the end of July) but I was so exhausted the most I could do was stand for 15 seconds before nearly collapsing to the floor.

Recovery was brutal and slow. I could barely stand. Towards the end of my hospital stay I could walk with a zimmer and/or a cane, but not unassisted.

I was lucky that I had a lovely private room in C2, when I was returned there. Normally I would have been bored, being by myself, but with all the sleeping I was doing I was just thankful that there was no one to disturb me.

It was a painfully slow recovery.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

During all of these adventures in medicine my father found out I was in hospital, nearly dying. He tried his damndest to get back to Canada. According to my aunt Emilija he kept his mobile on his chest at all times (even when sleeping) waiting for news about me. He tried to rearrange his flight so he could leave immediately to get to my side as fast as possible. My father was a wreck when my sister died, and he was terrified that another one of his sprogs would die. He managed to finish off his hols in Lithuania but it wasn’t much of a finish … the old egg was terrified for me, and I do truly believe this was a contributing factor towards his very swift decline in health and eventual death.

My mother hasn’t fared much better either. She had a heart attack a couple of weeks after I was released from hospital. Instead of telling me, she chose to protect me .. thinking I would have a relapse over the stress. She had actually decided to lie down for a bit, instead of getting medical attention .. telling herself that the pain she was feeling was probably similar to what I felt.

The other effect of my time with sepsis is that when I do leave a message on the answering machine I get a very quick ring back asking if I’m okay. My father was doing that right up until the end, freaking out whenever I’d leave a message.

Geeklawyer Had DNS errors with his old DNS provider. They have been binned and he is back (thanks 123cheapdomains.com) to the dismay of some.

Chop two strong red onions and four cloves of garlic. Fry in a humungous amount of butter with some mustard, chili powder, and powdered ginger. Once the onions are done, add your mussels, enough white wine to barely cover them, and some concentrated fish stock*. Depending on how salty the stock is you may want to add some sugar. Cook until the liquid has reduced and turned to gloop. Remove from the heat, and add some chopped baby pea pods. Stir in the peapods, and serve with lemon rice and the remainder of the wine.

* you must use a concentrated stock here, as you don't want to add any more liquid than necessary. You can easily make this, of course, by taking your normal fish stock and reducing it seperately.

I got home this evening to find an Unexpected Parcel waiting for me, full of books. I have no idea who it's from, but I'm guessing that it's from someone who finds CPANdeps useful. Thank you, Anonymous Benefactor! Your generosity is much appreciated!

Some bumpkins reckon that an art installation will attract 100,000 visitors a year to Dorset. They say this in an attempt to justify the artwork.

In this, they are wrong on at least two counts> First, popularity is not a good measure of artistic merit - consider how well "RnB" "music" sells, or how inexplicably expensive some of Damien Hirst's awful work is - and art does not need such jusitification, at least not if it's any good. And second, they're wrong about the number of people who will bother to go along to this ridiculous "observatory".

What's more, it won't bring "millions of pounds into the local economy". That would imply each of the 100,000 people they reckon will visit would spend at least 20 quid to do so. They won't. The only people who will bother looking at the silly thing are a handful of people who were going to visit the area anyway.

In practice, this is nothing but a make-work project cleverly put together by the artist, who will no doubt be hoping for lots of extinctions so he can be paid to add more and more pointless chunks of stone.

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In June 2010 I read the following books:

1. The Star Fraction, by Ken MacLeod - Very good: 4/5

While this is the first installment in a trilogy, it still works well as a stand-alone novel, and, unlike many other first installments, it actually has a proper end to match its beginning and middle. The world of the story is not entirely explained, which leads to some of the politics that forms a major part of it being rather perplexing, which troubled me the first time I read it (and stopped half-way through as Real Life intruded and ate all my time) but this time, I worked through it, and came away satisfied despite that. Normally I slate books which spend as much time as this does on the characters' politics. But in this case, it's leavened with a constant stream of stuff happening and the politics of micro-states and collectives is intimately tied with the characters' backgrounds and personalities, so it serves not to obfuscate but to shed light - notwithstanding the sometimes perplexing ideologies.

The only significant nit I can pick is that the end, the last thirty or so pages, feel somewhat rushed, while still tieing up most (but not all) of the loose ends. Where the vast bulk of the book covers only a handful of days, those pages cover several months. I can only assume that that will turn out to have been necessary in one of the sequels.

Worth buying.

2. Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod - Excellent: 5/5

While the setting is really rather implausible, having two species with such similar social structures, this does make it easier for the author to create sympathetic, believable characters on both sides - and he does this well. Both refer to themselves as human, and both are human. The slow build-up to the final climactic meeting, told largely from the point of view of unimportant people, makes the book a compulsive page-turner, and highly recommended.

3. Replay, by Ken Grimwood - Excellent: 5/5

I suppose it's very naughty of me to immediately think of Groundhog Day when reading this story of a man repeating part of his life over and over again. Naughty because Groundhog Day was really not very good. "Replay" has so much more depth, the characters are given enough time to experience and grow and change. It's marketed (wrongly in my opinion) as fantasy, and some reviewers instead think (also wrongly) that it's science fiction. I suppose that they think that because the main characters' repeating lives are beyond the realms of modern experience and aren't explained, but the mechanism that lets them repeat their lives is utterly unimportant. Other writers, over a period of hundreds of years dating back to the early mediaeval period have used dreams for similar purposes: to impart knowledge and wisdom to their characters so that at the end of the dream they are changed and improved. We don't call The Dream Of The Rood science fiction, or Pearl fantasy*, so why attempt to shoe-horn "Replay" into one of those litle boxes?

This is that rare beast - both splendid literature, beautifully written and constructed; and a great story, accessible and entertaining. You should read it.

* it's a fantasy, as are all fictions, but it does not fit in the modern genre of that name

4. Comrade Rockstar, by Reggie Nadelson - Good: 3/5

Dean Reed was a late fifties / early sixties rock n' roll singer and guitarist who, after a very brief career in the US became wildly popular in Chile. Always something of a leftie, he became involved in political activism in Chile around the time of the Pinochet coup, and ended up emigrating to East Germany where he spent most of the rest of his life. In the GDR and the rest of the Soviet bloc, he was wildly popular, both as a musician (the people loved rock n' roll, the party loved him for his genuine support of the great Marxist experiment) and as an actor. He also appeared in some Spaghetti Westerns.

In 1986 he died in rather suspicious circumstances near his home in Berlin. This book, while being to a certain extent a biography, is subtitled "the search for Dean Reed" and is really the tale of the author's attempt between roughly 1986 and 1988 (a very small amount of material was added after the wall came down) to figure out who the hell was this American rock n' roller who was so big in the East and how he died. Unfortunately, the author has really just collected lots of facts (some of dubious veracity, which she is quite open about), spun some stories around them about how she learned them (some of which are interesting in themselves), but has not done a particularly good job of integrating them into a coherent whole. It is, no doubt, a fairly accurate retelling of the search for information about Reed, but suffers from that - the end product of research should not just be a detailed account of how you did the research, where, and when. It should also be a synthesis of what was found during the research. In this, it comes soooo close, but isn't quite there.

I do recommend this book, despite it really needing an editor. The subject matter is fascinating and does eventually paint a believable and somewhat sympathetic picture of its subject. Yes, sympathetic, despite the author obviously disagreeing with Reed's politics, despite his loyalty to the East German state. Reed comes across as being naive, lonely, and somewhat self-obsessed. He is a flawed individual, not just a cardboard-cutout Evil Commie.

5. Who Goes There, by John W. Campbell - Meh: 2/5

Last month I reviewed The Things by Peter Watts, which riffs off the excellent John Carpenter film "The Thing". Carpenter's film is in turn based on this short story. And, I'm afraid to say, this is one of those few cases where the film is better than the book. The suspense, the lurking horror, is well done. But Campbell's descriptions are stupid and overblown - one of the main characters, for example, is always described as being "bronze". And worse by far is that the end is far too clean. All the monsters are found and killed, job done, the crew then expect to just carry on as normal. Carpenter's film version has a much more convincing finale where you can't be sure everything's fine and there's certainly no happy ending. Not worth reading.

6. The Execution Channel, by ken MacLeod - Excellent: 5/5

Set in a near-future near-totalitarian dystopia, this spy caper is nasty, grimy, grim, almost plausible, and most enjoyable. It does have a flaw that I also noticed in The Star Fraction earlier this month - namely that people are rather too predictably manipulable, as if MacLeod has read rather too much Asimov and thinks psychohistory should apply to individuals. In the earlier book, this was taken to the extreme, with individuals' actions and reactions to stimuli predicted a long way in advance, which is obviously laughable. Of course, MacLeod is something of a Marxist, and the parallels between Asimov's psychohistory and Marx's "historical materialism" are striking.

But this flaw really doesn't detract from the story at all, and I unreservedly recommend this book.

7. Angels and Spaceships, by Fredric Brown - Very good: 4/5

This short collection of short stories (some of them very short, only 400-ish words) includes one of my favourites by any author, "Answer". All of them fizz with humour and inventiveness, most have a devious twist at the end. The only thing keeping this from getting top marks is that some stories main plot elements and closure are rather dated. That doesn't detract much from the story though, so I recommend this book. I also recommend (without having read it) Best Short Stories, another collection of Brown's.

8. Eve, by Aurelio O'Brien - Good: 3/5

In the far future of this novel, mankind has engineered biological "perfection", but, of course, this perfection isn't really that perfect. With every whim catered for by engineered bio-mass - everything from their homes to their sex toys - humanity is bored, and is desperate for something better, but most are too hide-bound and they outwardly conform to the norm that everyone else (did they but know it) loathes. Our hero breaks the rules, and eventually (due to the scheming of the narrator) gets caught. But all live happily ever after anyway when, in a rather unbelievable and weak court scene, it is made clear that the norm is, well, far from being the norm.

It's a nice, rather uplifting story. However, there's little depth and some glaring inconsistencies. It would get four stars, just about, because it is fun, but the typesetting and the feel of the cover and the pages (it's a self-published novel) pulls it down to three. This seems like such a little thing, I know, but there it is. I'd say this is worth reading if you can find it cheap or in the library, but not worth paying the sort of prices it normally goes for. It's available fairly cheaply in electronic form, but unfortunately only in PDF format, which is really not suitable for e-books, as it doesn't re-format well to fit typical readers' small screens.

9. Last Orders at Harrods, by Michael Holman - Excellent: 5/5

By turns a farce, a satire, and a polemic, this book is bursting with lively, real-seeming people. The author is clearly angry about the foreign aid industry, and provides a scathing critique of how pointless most of it is and how naive so many of its champions and its employees are, while still managing to entertain and delight. Whole-heartedly recommended.

10. One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, by Clive Woodall - Meh: 2/5

The cover blurb says that this is "an epic tale in the tradition of 'Watership Down' and 'Lord of the Rings'. That was clearly written by someone who has read neither book. Perhaps who hasn't read Woodall's story either. I remember that several years ago when this first came out, it got quite a lot of media attention (well done to the publisher's Hype department) much of which centred on the fact that the author worked in a supermarket. Well, Clive - don't give up the day job.

The book isn't awful - the writing is unimaginative but is clear and simple; the characters are rather flat but are easily distinguishable; the plot is nothing special but the setting is vaguely interesting. It would make quite a good book for children, I think.

What really lets it down is the structure. There's a clear beginning, middle and end. And then another middle and an inconclusive second ending. If I were the editor, I'd have truncated the book just before the end of the first ending, leaving out the few pages that set up the second middle section, and would also cut out one minor character who only exists to feature inconclusively in the second middle section. That would make it an even better book for children, and it might even be worth 4 stars out of five like that.

I have been reading a number of news articles lately, with the theme being “taking personal responsibility”. There is the case of some hockey parents taking a local hockey association to court for cutting their sons from the 2010/11 season.

The G/20 fiasco that happened in Toronto just this past weekend – who is going to pay for the clean-up and damages? The City of Toronto, which did not want the Summit, or the Federal Government? The Feds were advised by locals that using the Metro Toronto Convention Centre – in the heart of the business district in the city centre – would be not advisable and instead to use the grounds of the Toronto Exhibition Place, which has excellent conference facilities, a more easily monitored and secured perimeter and is away from most small businesses and homes.

And now I have just read the case of a woman who tried suing her bank because she’s on the hook for a mortgage which she foolishly got into because she sold her signature as a co-signer. See the article here. The heart of the article/story is:

A stranger calling himself Mike approached to offer help. When Isaacs called him later, he said she could earn $4,000 for co-signing a mortgage — just for six months — so a man with a poor credit rating could buy a house. (Not hers.)

Later Isaacs had second thoughts, but forged ahead when offered $6,000. She was paid when the house at 48 John Stoner Dr., near Markham Rd. and Finch Ave. E., was sold.

The documents she signed without reading were presented to her by mortgage agent Marcia Briggs, by a Royal Bank mortgage specialist, and by a secretary to lawyer Mark Kushner, who has been suspended twice for professional misconduct.

Isaacs maintains she did not recognize the fraud until the bank notified her was late paying $1,838, the first payment for a $280,000 mortgage on a house she owned with a man calling himself Mark Forrest.

The Supreme Court of Canada was quite clear in a prior ruling that anyone who foolishly signs, even without their knowledge, an agreement which can defraud another (in this case, the bank) then that individual should be held liable.

This goes to the heart of the “taking personal responsibility” that I have been seeing lately. The woman is responsible. Whenever signing a document, always read all the details before putting pen to paper. Society, in general, is more and more dependant on others to take care of them. Whatever happened to making sure that you fully understand before signing? If holding a party/summit in a city you have very little knowledge of, why ignore the advice of locals? And why are children being raised to expect that they are the greatest? Parents should be raising their kids so that they know how to deal with adversity and challenges.

Woke up early, nudge Tarotcub awake, and the arduous task of packing our suitcases begain. We actually finished rather early and instead of sitting about we decided to take an early train into London.

On our trip into the UK we took the tube down to Victoria Station – which required a couple of changes to different lines. It was difficult with suitcases, so I had decided that we should throw caution to the wind and pay a  bit more to use the Heathrow Express from Paddington. This required a train from Ely to Kings Cross and from Kings Cross to Paddington. Only 2 changes, and thankfully at Kings Cross we could take the lift. Though we paid a bit more, it was much more comfortable, especially with our luggage. Got to Heathrow T5 and it turns out we were 2 hours early before the check-in was open for our flight. Found a coffee shop within the terminal and just sat about and adjusted our luggage so that we wouldn’t exceed the weight allowance.

Finally checked in our luggage and went through security. Unlike other terminals which would have quickie restaurants like McDonald’s or Burger King, T5 doesn’t have anything like that. Remembering that Rachael was espousing the Gordon Ramsay Plane Food restaurant, we went there for lunch. The food was very simply prepared, but very delicious. I had a rumpsteak, medium-rare, and Tarotcub had some chicken dish. We had just enough time for lunch, a quick stop at the toilets and then had to pile into a bus to get us to the plane. The flight back to Toronto was fine, nothing unusual. I couldn’t get us bulkhead seats this time, but we were luck that the ladies in front of us didn’t fling their seats all the way back. I did have to change seats with Tarotcub as he found sitting by the window too confining.

We watched the first 2 episodes of True Blood S3 that I had downloaded onto my netbook. Watched a few movies as well on BA’s video terminals and just generally had a pleasant experience. Just like the flight over the flight back had the special meal that I had requested, so I didn’t starve.

Thankfully Mr Squirrel had offered to pick us up from Pearson, which he did.

Yesterday was a long day, but hopefully our trip for both myself and Tarotcub was comfortable enough yesterday.

++++++++++++

I shall miss Ruthie.

Wish I had spent more time talking with Jakob, but that can be done next time I’m in the area.

Next year, possibly Lithuania?

As this was our last day, for myself and Tarotcub, we decided to stick close to Ruthie’s and just rest and relax. We went off to Ely.

The previous night Ruthie informed me that she was to have a tango lesson and while she was to learn how to fling her legs about in wild abandon we were to be entertained by a friend of her’s – Jakob. I met Jakob last year when I was visiting Ruthie. He’s a charming fellow, lives in Cambridge, and just like Ruthie enjoys tango and motorcycles.

So while in Ely Tarotcub and I just walked about, picked up some items at Waitrose and had lunch by the canal. Picked up some tea for my mother and got back to Ruthie’s for a quick shower.

At Jakob’s we were treated to a lovely and delicious barbeque. There were several bottles of wine consumed. I got a big glass of cranberry juice with a big grapefruit wedge in it. We did some chit chatting, and as is our wont, the double entendres were flying.  Ruthie joined us after  her tango lesson, and at one point she cuddled up to me. The woman better accept my marriage proposal … (cheeky grin). I did make her flush when I told her that during one night this week she did cuddle me in her sleep. Shockingly she decided to take a picture of my bum while I was l sleeping — the deepest violation of my trust, I must say. Seems that when her alarm went off at 6am I gently nudged her, as she had to be out of the house by 6:30am to make it in time for a visit to the cells. Ruthie was touched by my actions .. and yet she took a pic of my bum.

By the end of the evening we were all very tired. But being told that Jakob was willing to keep me for the night was a huge laugh.

When I got home to Ely the previous night I had received an email from Liam, who happened to be in London at the time. So I gave him my mobile number and told him to meet us at Holborn at noon, for our gallivanting excursion with Cantrell. We all got to Holborn with minutes to spare and had to wait for Cantrell.

We first went for a drink at a lovely pub that I cannot remember the name of. But it was around the corner from Holborn and it is one of the few pubs that has a protection order on the stain glass found in the gents and ladies’ toilets. The stain glass was absolutely beautiful and Rachael and I dutifully took pics of them. The men, for some reason, couldn’t bring themselves to bring their cameras to the gents.

The day was a bit of a blur for me, I admit, as my infection was getting worse; I had blood at that point, my joints were aching and I found it extremely difficult to walk with my entire body in pain, but I managed somehow. We ended up walking around Covent Garden area and Rachael spied an esoteric shop (pagan bookstore). We went in, with Cantrell saying rather loudly “what is this shit”. The shop owner took it in stride, laughed and invited Cantrell in for a pleasant debate if he wanted one. Seems Tarotcub, Rachael, Rob and myself spent a bit too long in the shop and in the meanwhile Cantrell and Liam wandered over to a camera shop. Found them outside. Went over to a korean restaurant, that serves food quickly and for a very cheap price.

After lunch, the Comic Museum on Little Russell. The museum is one of many small ones that does not receive government support, and only survives off of admission ticket prices and donations. I made a small donation of 2 quid, as I thought it excellent. The museum is small, but it has quite the celebration of British comic art, with a section on satire through the ages. Bought some books, one of them being a history of London Satirical comics.

We then wandered over to Lincoln Inn Fields, one of the four Inns of Court (each British Barrister belongs to an Inns of Court). At Lincoln’s Inn Fields can be found the Royal College of Surgeons. Within the College’s building is the Huntarian Museum — a surgical museum where there were some great oddities. Could not take pictures, they were not allowed. But some of the delights to behold were a bishop’s arse preserved in a great big glass jar (it was rather tight), a selection if skeletons (human and animal), dissection tables from the 17thC and 18thC, which included the human vascular system  (the body on the table was carefully carved away, so that only the vascular system remained) and another had the human nervous system.

After the Hunterian we went off someplace for drinks and eventual dinner. We spent a leisurely couple of hours at a pub, where the fascination in Cantrell continued to grow. The dinner was delicious, but by that point I was exhausted from trying to keep up. After dinner while the others rushed for a taxi to take them to Regent’s Park for a performance of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors I took a taxi to St Pancras, to catch the train to Ely from Kings Cross. Luckily, when the taxi deposited me by the Eurostar entrance to St Pancras (which is across the way from Kings Cross) the train was there, so I didn’t have to wait around .. weaving with a huge fever (I had a fever at that point). Ruthie picked me up, and I just rested up.

From what I was told by Tarotcub the next day, they all had to rush to get to Kings Cross for the final train.

June 23rd it was the first day to spend with a certain deviant chaperone – one Mr David Cantrell. Tarotcub and Rachael were tired from their adventures, so instead it was myself and Robert who made the trek from Ely to London to meet Cantrell for 10a at the Westminster Pier by the Embankment. We missed the train going down to Kings Cross so instead we took the train going to London Liverpool Street. That took a while, and when we reached the station there was a slow down on the line we needed. Ended up taking a taxi to meet Cantrell and in the meanwhile we missed the boat for Richmond; so instead we took the boat to Kew Gardens. The boat ride was fun, with very colourful commentary from one of the crew. I took some interesting pictures, including Battersea Power Station, Lambeth Palace, Chiswick and so forth. Landed at Kew, and we took off to a lovely pub.

Mr Cantrell is a tall gentleman and Robert took advantage of this as he himself is rather tall. I was left in the dust while those two bonded. Every once in a while they remembered me and stopped for a bit to make sure I hadn’t gotten lost. Got to the pub and that was Robert’s first experience of Pimm’s. There were several pitchers consumed during lunch. After lunch we went off to Kew Gardens.

I loved Kew Gardens, but I couldn’t fully appreciate it as at that point I was suffering quite acutely from a raging infection which was (and still is) causing me to tire very easily. But I managed to enjoy the various tree species, the glass houses which had some amazing botanicals from the Commonwealth, and the various little creatures littering the place. Saw a gorgeous peacock which was sitting in some shade, being coo’d over by a cute little toddler. The ducks, geese, swans and peacocks at Kew Gardens are quite accustomed to humans, so it was very easy to get up close to them.

Unfortunately the electrical generators went out at Kew so none of the cafes were serving drinks. Found a ice cream truck outside the gates and immediately I got myself an ice lolly and a bottle of diet coke. We made our way back to central London for dinner at a Thai Restaurant. A “lady boy” was serving us. The place was small, with a small menu, but the food was prepared quite nicely and deliciously.

Afterwards Cantrell and I went over to the Noel Coward Theatre for the Enron the Musical performance. For some odd reason my fellow Canucks did not want to join me in this excursion. But I was interested, in part because London is a major theatre centre and I could not pass up the opportunity to see some theatre whilst in London. The play was great and I would love to see it again. Cantrell got us some really good seats, second row, of the balcony. The theatre was not huge so it was very easy to see the entire audience and the stage as well. One of the details of the play that I really liked was that there was a screen hanging really high up showing the Enron share prices during all the events being depicted. I would highly recommend the play to anyone. Another moment of enjoyment for me was during the intermission. There was a fellow trying to explain the arcane attributes of accountantcy to his date — it was highly amusing listening to him.

After the play I really wanted to just find a hotel to spend the night, instead of making the trek up to Ely. Tried 5 hotels but nothing. So thankfully Holborn Station is only 2 tube stops from Kings Cross so I was able to make the last train at 11:15pm, rolling into Ely at 12:30 for Ruthie to pick me up.

Early in the morning Ruthie, Tarotcub and I myself prepared ourselves for our arduous plane ride over to Deutschland — all 90 minutes of it.

We did not drive over to Gatwick, but instead took the train down to King’s Cross and then took the Gatwick Express down to Gatwick Airport from St Pancras. Our flight was with FlyBE, on which we had the ever lovely Bombardier Dash 8 plane — it has propellers! While booking this flight over a month ago I was clicking rather madly and had mistakenly requested baby food for Tarotcub. I couldn’t change it, but fortunately, as the flight was so short we didn’t get served any food unless we were prepared to pay for it — which I did, I got a lovely can of diet coke for the lovely price of 1 pound. While waiting at the gate to get onto our tiny shuttle bus to our plane Ruthie and I were playing a silly game of “Spot the Germans”. We were doing okay except over one chap who we both swore was East German but turned out to be some Brit.

Yalla met us at the Dusseldorf Airport and we took a taxi to our hotel — Hotel Tonnchen. I thought it cute, but for some reason both Ruthie and Tarotcub couldn’t see the delights in having bath towels that can exfoliate you. After depositing our multiple bags (we didn’t check in anything, that would have cost us extra with FlyBE, so we each had either a duffel bag or a backpack) Yalla took us to the Rhine, where there is a lovely riverside promenade. We had dinner there, strolled about, and just generally relaxed. I really liked where we had dinner. It was nice, after the stuffy pubs of England, to be in the equivalent of a beer garden by a river with a lovely breeze. There was a tacky german dj playing some questionable music. But I still shaked my booty whilst there. I had been overcome with a giddy feeling. I had forgotten how much I loved being in Germany, and being there by the Rhine was just a balm to the soul.

After dinner we strolled about the Altstadt, and just generally enjoyed the merriment and the huge soccer fever that has gripped Germany. Got to the hotel and prepared ourselves for the next day – the industry culture event which gripped a goodly portion of Dusseldorf. We actually took the train to Oberhausen to view the sights in that district. We started at the Gasometer, which is a disused steelworks; it is now a community “centre” where  people can use a rock climbing wall, a little playground for children, and it is also a historical testiment to the german industrial heartland. Met up with Sven, who I had not seen since the Lithuanian LBW, had dinner at an Argentine Steakhouse, checked out a really funky set of art installations and went to a museum explaining the areas industrial history — with posters and newspapers from the 20s and 30s, showing the rise of Hitler and his focus on the ideal Aryan Man/Woman. Went back to the Gasometer for some midnight fireworks, which were a bust. And my camera got a touch moist, so it didn’t work. Rang Mr Mark, as he’s the only one I know who loves cameras (my paternal uncle was a very good photographer and I would have turned to him first, but he sadly passed away 5  years ago). So I didn’t get to pictorially remember the lunar display at the Gasometer .. a giant reflection of the moon, rotating at the same rate as the moon.. it was stunning and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Next day, we were quite knackered, having returned to our hotel around 3:30am. I must say, the efficiency of the german train system was amazing so we didn’t have to worry about late trains .. and they are everywhere … EVERYWHERE.

So we got to Yalla and  Kerstin’s for breakfast around noon (we had been doing this for each of our mornings in Dusseldorf) and we had a leisurely day of going to the AquaZoo and the Japanese Gardens just behind the zoo. Had dinner at a casual pub/restaurant very close by to Yalla and Kerstin and I had the most amazing schnitzel in my life. Because I was without a camera I had to use Ruthie’s. She willingly allowed me to use it, as she mistakenly believes I take good pictures.

Next day, Cologne! But first, I had to get a new camera. I got a Fuji FinePix S1600 for 169 Euros. Tarotcub sat there quietly while I was going through the different cameras. As all my old cameras have been handed over to him whenever I upgrade he was quite excited at see what he terms as his soon-to-be-camera. Finally I purchased my camera and we were off to Cologne! We took the train instead of driving over in Kerstin’s car — as there is some sort of centuries old rivalry between Cologne & Dusseldorf which nowadays is captured in the argument over who produces the better beer, Cologne’s Kolsch or Dusseldorf’s Altbier. As Kerstin informed us if she drove over because her car license plate indicates she is from Dusseldorf she will get ticked by the Cologne Police.

Got to Cologne and were greeted with a huge Dom, which is Cologne’s Cathedral. It is so massive that last time I saw it was was the dominating structure in the skyline half an hour before my boat (Koln-Dusseldorfer) docked at the harbour. It’s also all black, and as was said rather jokingly … can’t clean it, cos once you finish you have to start all over again at the beginning. We wandered about Cologne, did some shopping and just generally got a feeling for the place. Met up with Sven again, and afterwards we headed over to an Irish Bar to meet some LBW peeps who I had not seen in a number of years – Jens, Edwin and Antony.

Next day was to be our flight back to Gatwick, but we still had time. So we had breakfast in the Altstadt and wandered about looking for last minute items to purchase. I picked up some pots of mustard, unique to Dusseldorf, german chocolates and Yalla got me a CD of schlaeger music. Tarotcub had expressed to Kerstin that he wanted some Kinder Chocolates, cos the stuff we get back in Canada isn’t that great. While we were in some shop she secretly snuck off and presented Chris with a bag full of Kinder chocolates .. that was super sweet of Kerstin. We had lunch and then piled into the car to get to the Dusseldorf Airport. I had made sure that my liquids and gels were already in a clear plastic bag and ready for me to present. So I got through security fairly easily, but Tarotcub and Ruthie had to purchase some bags so they could seperate.

Flew into Gatwick, and there was some switching error on the tracks so it took us waiting 45 minutes to get onto the Gatwick Express. Luckily, when it pulled into St Pancras the wait at King’s Cross was relatively short and we made it back to Ely before the sun had set.

Some thoughts:

• Ruthie and I were dismayed to discover that the German Government is using the tax system to dictate social policy – Kerstin, as the one making less income in the partnership, is taxed at a rate of 80%. So there is an incentive for mothers to be stay-at-home mothers because it isn’t financially viable for them to work
• We were also stunned that there are special parking spots – and not just for the disabled. There are spots for “Mothers and Children”, not “parents with young children” but “mothers”. As well there are spots specifically women-only. We were told it was because of rapes happening in carparks and parking garages. My comment was that instead they should just increase security in parking areas, as men can just as easily get assaulted
• Other than the very paternalistic approach to women, which I took great issue with, my time in Germany was great. I got to see Yalla and Kerstin (who are absolutely lovely people), got molested by their cat Spot who has a particularly odd fetish for shampoos & haircare products and will climb you just to groom you. The visit to Germany was also necessary for my sanity .. it was nice to be in a breezy place, where one did not have to fear for their life trying to get to the bar to place an order
• And my true highlight was watching Tarotcub experience Germany for the first time. The different types of beers he tried was astounding

Day 6 for myself was a leisurely trip up to Hunstanton as per Ruthie’s suggestion. The trip consisted of taking a train up to King’s Lynn and then a bus. Somehow the gods were shining upon myself and Tarotcub as the bus to and from Hunstanton showed up within minutes of us getting to the bus stop/station. The most interesting aspect of the travelling was that our bus was full of OAPs. They were a jolly lot.

Hunstanton is a pretty little village/town on The Wash. There are no great big castles, cathedrals, palaces or whatnot. What there is to be found is some very breathtaking views. The cliffs are stunning. Tarotcub and I took a leisurely walk along a road running alongside the beach promenade, to view the few historically significant sites — St Edmund’s Chapel (who I discovered was the first patron saint of England, before being displaced by St George), a now privately owned lighthouse, and an old building for the local “coast guard”. As well, there was an aquarium.

While strolling about we ran across a “Sensory Garden” – a garden specifically created for the disabled in mind — with wide winding paths, plenty of seating and flower & trees of very strong scent; everything to delight the senses … scents, colours, textures. While there we ran across a very small stone circle. It wasn’t ancient, just something the town had put up around a tree, with the names of herbs etched into each one.

We walked along the beach, took some truly stunning pics of the cliffs and the little creatures we found – like jellyfish, seagulls, pigeons roosting in the cliffs, tiny crayfish/crabs. We also found the wreck of an old ship, probably dating back to WWII. The aquarium was fun too, though we only had 30 minutes to see it. Got to see some penguins, seals, and interesting little fishes.

Got home to Ruthie’s where she actually cooked for us. It was spaghetti bolognese, but made with quorn not real meat. It was a vegetarian feast.

Next day, Germany!

The Open Air Theatre in Regents Park is one of my favourite theatres EVAR, matched only, perhaps, by the Minack theatre in Cornwall. I go to Regents Park most years for one of their excellent productions of Mr. Shakespeare's work.

This year it was the Comedy of Errors. I'll not bother to review the play itself, because if you don't already know and appreciate it you are a barbarian and Philistine. The production is worth a few words though.

Set in French North Africa in the 1930s, it is faithful to the script but also with a few song n' dance numbers. I wonder if these were lifted from the 1977 musical version? Anyway, they are entirely in keeping with Shakespeare, whose comedies in particular were the mass-market entertainment of his day. The acting is mostly good - it was perhaps a bit stilted early on, but the main cast soon got going properly. The minor characters of Aegeon and the Duke didn't have the time to de-stilt themselves though, and Aegeon's opening speech was quite wearisome.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable performance, and I recommend it.

Seeing that one of my Canuckistani visitors this week is an accountant, and also (mainly, to tell the truth) because someone at work recommended it, I took Mistress Beanie to see ENRON at the Noël Coward theatre a coupla days ago.

I can see why some of the critics didn't like it: the US critics wouldn't have liked the making obvious of the connections between political corruption, greed, and crass nationalism, and the making explicit of at least some of the bad guys being devoutly religious. It gets loud and in yer face about how this is the result of the "American Dream". Other critics would have hated the loud, modern music, the couple of musical numbers in what is otherwise a straight play, the use of video, and the decidedly modernist set design.

But they were all wrong. It's a great play - lively, flamboyant even, telling a great story (that it's a true story doesn't really matter much), and does a surprisingly good job of explaining what went on at Enron. I liked it a lot, and recommend it.

To blame or not to blame, that is the question. Politics and science sometimes just don’t mix, and now we have another example right out of the real life. You think politicians are sane or educated enough to cope with science? You think they actually understand what science is about? You better think twice. This is insane:

News out of Italy suggests that seven researchers who did not predict the L’Aquila earthquake in April 2009 are under formal investigation and may be charged with gross negligent manslaughter.

I wonder if they will charge Berlusconi for aiding and abetting because he cut funds for basic research.

Next on: Politicians sueing meterologists for Kathrina. Politicians sueing vulcanologists for Mt. St. Helens. Politicians sueing petrologists for the BP oil spill. Errrr… Right.

Film at 10.

Thusfar I have revisted Ely Cathedral and ambled about the city with my three other travelling companions. Dinner consisted of first stopping off at the local Tescos.  I have to admit I do not get overly enthused by grocery stores, they usually serve a purpose and once that purpose is met I tend to go away. But I am travelling with peeps who have never flown to the UK, so everything is a new experience which needs to be savoured and dwelled upon — so I am seeing the UK from a fresh perspective.

The next day was Norwich, which has a very strong medieval history, dating back to the time of William the Conqueror. We got to wander about, and my fantasy of seeing the section of Norwich with a huge collection of Tudor architecture was met … and I was in raptures.

Today Tarotcub and I went down to London to find Highgate Cemetary. This required us going into Islington, specifically the Archway Tube Station on the Northern Line. I did not like the area, and you know an area is quite sketchy when all the local pubs advertise cheque-cashing services — much like MoneyMart back home. We managed to find our way back to Ely and took a taxi back to Ruthie’s hof.

This evening was the Rotary Club of Ely weekly meeting. Ruthie is a member, and we joined her. The meal was cheap but quite delicious — I had gammon with fried egg and chips. I chose not to have dessert. The “talk” was about fibre optic cabling and how BT is behind in making sure that the UK is properly serviced for broadband connectivity. The two geeks in our little foursome put forth their ideas, while I interjected from an economic perspective with regards to private vs public funding of national projects.

Now I sit in the hof typing away, secretly jealous of tarotcub’s sticky toffee pudding with custard.

This is so sad. What was once probably one of the coolest jobs on Earth – “Constellation Program Manager” – now turns out to be something deliberately pepped up. NASA News writes:

Lawrence D. Thomas has been appointed manager of NASA’s Constellation Program, which manages the effort to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit and develop the next generation launch vehicle and spacecraft.

Watch the emphasis (mine). We wanted to go to the Moon, Mars and also get back. Orion? Merely an escape-vehicle for the ISS, if at all. Ares? Canceled. Altair? Who knows.

Anyway: Congratulations to Lawrence Thomas!

Out there at Technology Review I found this article about an “AI” (you may raise your eyebrows here) which is supposed to better in stock-market speculations than actual humans. For a brief introduction let me quote TR:

It’s called the Arizona Financial Text system, or AZFinText, and it works by ingesting large quantities of financial news stories (in initial tests, from Yahoo Finance) along with minute-by-minute stock price data, and then using the former to figure out how to predict the latter. Then it buys, or shorts, every stock it believes will move more than 1% of its current price in the next 20 minutes – and it never holds a stock for longer.

TR points out, that analyses similar to the described algorithm exists since the 90ies. However, the new systems doesn’t actually parse all the data, but concentrates on some keywords which seem to be of relevance.

I see two very odd flaws there.

1. A good AI predicting the stock-market based on human-written text – which could be technically used by *anyone* who could afford it – would lead to a situation where stocks keep heating up. Speculation will grow rapidly and positive feedback loops will possibly run into an overdrive situation. I wouldn’t opt in for a ban on such a software but on full disclosure if this software was used on a certain bid. This could help in debugging situations and to give legislators something to think off when the shit already hit the fan.
2. If the algorithm actually concentrates on keywords in context rather than in the whole analysis of the text, I bet a fiver that it wouldn’t even take a few weeks until some clever consulting company analyzed the algorithm and makes up a process how to tweak your fiscal reports so that AZFinText favours this text. Think of the stock-market equivalent of a Google bomb.

Nobody in Technology Review’s forum seems to be worried about the real-life implications… I think I’m just pointing out the obvious and that the stock-market professionals already made up their own ideas.

I am now sitting in Ruthie’s livingroom, enjoying the swaying of the trees outdoors and the meow of her remaining pussy. Plans today consist of actually taking it easy and going into Ely to wander about, check out Ely Cathedral (known as the Ship of the Fens), Oliver Cromwell’s House, The Maltings and just general enjoyment of the area.

We landed at Heathrow on Saturday morning and it appears that our agreed upon meetup location with Rob & Rachael was not such a good idea — Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant is only accessible in Departures, once past security. Tarotcub and I were about to get them paged when we found them.

A madcap travel adventure to get to Brighton ensued. Got onto the Underground and changed stations at Acton Town onto the District Line to get us to Victoria. Once we reached Victoria had to get a train down to Brighton. A fairly easy trip, yes? Not when you have 4 colonials, of which 2 had never been on the Underground, and all 3 of them not with luggage. I warned that the tube trains are narrow.

Got down to Brighton, got to our hotel and dumped our luggage there to go meandering about until our rooms were ready. Found a cute little pub called The Pull & Pump and had the most amazing chips w/ gravy. The gravy was so good that Robert drank some of it.

Finally got into our rooms. The others decided to refreshen themselves, while I wandered into one of the hotel bars to try and find some wifi. I was desperate to get in touch with Rah-Rah, with regards to the BrightonPissup organised on Twitter and to get my SIM that the lovely Geeklawyer had purchased for me. Eventually found Rah_rah and gang at a beach bar called Oh So Cool, by a big metal doughnut.

I was enthusiastically greeted by one Manxstef, Rah_rah, Stupidgirl_no1, Jaffne and Emargee (my psuedo husband, as I am his meat-wife). Special_noodles was cool and waved at me. I came bearing chthulus as gifts, and a wee husky for Rah_rah. I had great fun but Tarotcub wasnn’t overly enthused with the bar so he took a wander. As the night progressed Stef and Jaffne discovered something about me … I avoid cameras and am rather adept at it. Then this whole game of “let’s catch Beanie unawares” began. A lot of the pics were of my hand. I am so pleased!

Yesterday, Sunday, the arduous trip up to Ely began. Brighton to Victoria, Victoria to King’s Cross, King’s Cross to Ely. Only thing that threw me off (I had done though route several times) was that King’s Cross is under serious renovation. When I was there last year there was a building … it’s all been torn down, only the platforms remain. Got picked up at Ely Rail Station. And got introduced to a plethora of people at Ruthie’s Tea & Tango Party. Unfortunately the hottub did not heat up until later in the day … and the frivolities truly began. I managed to take quite a few pictures of the various hottub antics.

Today, Ely!

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In May 2010 I read the following books:

1. Last And First Men, by Olaf Stapledon - Meh: 2/5

This is another of those supposedly great works ("science fiction's greatest ascent", according to Stephen Baxter) that is actually a load of pish. Sure, it's undeniably imaginative and even "epic". It's certainly a significant work - virtually none before and few stories since have been written on such a vast scale. But it is boring and repetitive, utterly lacking in humanity (even though it purports to be a history of humanity and concentrates, due to the author's background, on philosophical notions), and feels like it was written by a pedantic Victorian school-teacher.

I can say a few things in its defence though. Even though much of the science is laughably wrong, it is at least pretty good for its time. For example, Stapledon describes plate tectonics (proprosed by Wegener, a meterologist, in 1912, to explain the shapes of Africa and South America and the similar fossils either side of the south Atlantic; not generally accepted until the 1950s or 60s), genetic engineering (although he skips over the details, for obvious reasons), stellar evolution. He is also entirely correct about mankind's utter insignificance on the galactic scale.

But ultimately, it's the boring and repetitive nature of the book that stands out. Not worth reading.

2. The Things, by Peter Watts - Excellent: 5/5

One of my favourite films is The Thing, an adaptation of a novella by John W Campbell. Both the original novella and the film tell their story from the point of view of human protagonists. Why does no-one ever think about how the evil aliens feel? Well, that's what Watts has done with this short story. He's taken John Carpenter's film adaptation (yes, he's working from the film, not from the novella), and re-told it from the evil alien's perspective. And done a damned fine job of it. Highly recommended, and free to read (for now, at any rate) online.

3. The Revolution Business, by Charles Stross - Meh: 2/5

The fifth installment in the series, and series-itis is rearing its head I'm afraid. It's getting a bit silly and over-the-top (you could tell that from the cover: a dude in plate armour, with a Maxim gun to one side and, errm, a nuke going off in the background) but that I can live with. It's fiction, it's entertainment, not serious literature. Unfortunately, there's rather too much politicking and I get the feeling that some fairly important background has been edited out in the process of turning the three huge books that were planned into six small books. That politicking is too opaque to the reader and takes away from the silly entertainment. And there's no chance at all that this would work in isolation - if you've not read the previous books, this will score nul points.

I still got some enjoyment from it, but there were too many points, especially in the last quarter, when I came close to just putting the book down and not finishing it. So I'm afraid that I can't recommend this.

Ages ago I had a cystoplasy done plus a mitrofanoff to help me with my ongoing issues with my birth defect – bladder exstrophy. The cystoplasty was actually a re-do from my original one in ’83. When I was sliced open my augmented bladder had adhered itself to my uterus and it was much easier to just re-do the cystoplasty, so in essence I’m on my third bladder iteration (or my second neo-bladder). The goal of all of this was to make my life easier, as my urinary sphincter (yes Virginia, there is more than one sphincter in the body) refused to work after multiple surgeries. I was getting a UTI once every 2-3 weeks, and other embarrassing events.

So the goal was to make my life easier. And in some ways it is. For the first time in my life I don’t have to worry about leakage, wearing pads, and have a relatively clean-cathing process. But the downsides have been massive. When I get sick now, it’s major .. no more simple UTIs, oh no. Now it’s things like sepsis, kidney infections, bladder stones, fungal infections of the surgical site, and though not as many UTIs the ones I get are major.

If I could turn back the clock so to speak I truly believe I would get this reversed, if it did any good. Granted I was on Depends and there was the social embarrassement of that, but atleast I was never sent to the hospital nearly dying from an untreated UTI that decided to turn into sepsis. And if I could I would never had made the decision to do the surgery.

But I have also been reading various bladder exstrophy sites, different urological papers and they tend to agree with one thing. Anyone, just about anyone, who catheterises has a greater chance of sepsis than someone who uses their urethra in the regular way. So I could have gotten the sepsis if I hadn’t had the surgery, I don’t know.

All I know is that I am very tired of my body not obeying me. It’s breaking down and there’s nothing I can do about it.

I rushed myself to the ER yesterday cos I had abdominal pain, and it wasn’t the pain I was getting this year associated with gall bladder issues. This was a different kind of pain, with major spasms .. very similar to the spasms I had last year before I vomitted blood, passed out, and got intibated while being rushed to ICU.

I am scared. I cried last night out of frustration and fear.

June 3rd is my official date of birth. But due to my parents’ lack of consideration I was born on a date which is very inconvenient for me — right in the middle of monthend. So this past Sunday I celebrated, with the help of some dear and rather kooky friends, “Me Birfday”.

I had requested no gifts, and thankfully my wishes were met .. no gifts, except from my Sassy Gay Best Friend Forever, one Mr Tarotcub. We have an agreement to give each other tacky yet fabulous gifts for no more than $10. It has worked out quite well, and I have to admit, I have gotten to know Dollarama’s inventory rather well.

One fellow popped over to my abode a wee bit earlier, to delight me. As I love giving gifts I got him one for his upcoming birthing day. I got a small scowl and a threat of a gift. I was dead pleased.

Chose a cheap & cheerful chinese restaurant. There’s nothing outstanding about the place, I just like the atmosphere and the food is cheap.

Had a good time noshing on the food, though I couldn’t finish my dish.

Peeps who helped me celebrate my increasing senility were: Tarotcub, Mr Squirrel, Lyds, her Andrew, Madam Cat, Bobert, Rachael, Spiros, Stephanie, Daniel, Mr Mark, Mr B, Puck .. and moi.

After the meal some people took off to some evil ice cream place. While some of us picked up something to drink and headed over to Ryerson’s Quad to sit in the shade and just enjoy the lovely weather.

To make you all jealous of the fabulousness of it all.. here are some pics.

I’m just back from the ISC’10 Tutorial Sessions. Getting to and from Hamburg in one day from Düsseldorf is a pretty harsh thing you could do. First, the A1 was basically just a concatenation of construction sites, making it quite a hassle to get there. Means, I got there just on time.

We arrived at the registration desk at 13:20 sharp – Tutorial would start at 13:30. Registration was smooth. Give yer name and company, grab badge, WiFi-details, a map how to get from the CCH to the University and a schedule for all the tutorials.

First thing we didn’t like: The schedule was divided in tracks – there was a CUDA-track, an Infiniband-track, and so on. A lot of lectures in every individual track, but no timeline, when the individual talks should start! It was hard to decide what to do first.

We grabbed our stuff and had a really short walk of probably 5 minutes to the venue. The building was a typical: A huge 1900′s building, huge, massive, a lot of stairs – but eventually we got into the lecture room B, where we wanted to hear the CUDA tutorial.

Unfortunately, the CUDA talk wasn’t anything new. I really think that the slides of this tutorial were actually used in a NVIDIA webinar about CUDA I attended last year! It was a real Deja Vu, and I think they just changed the date on that slides. Gernot Ziegler started up with the tutorial – I thought this would be “big time”, cause we’d get the opportunity to hear someone who’s really into CUDA – he’s with NVIDIA after all. Anyway, he passed over the tutorial to John Stratton, who did quite a decent job, but he was pretty unlucky for he had to reiterate that presentation I already enjoyed last year in the webinar.

Ah, what a wasted opportunity. See, I’d expect more from the ISC when it comes to CUDA than reciting what was told earlier on less specific channels!

My colleague and me stuck to the talk until the long break – some cool things were said about how to abuse the texture-buffer in a clever way to to really local multidimensional computations, but unfortunately it wasn’t elaborated enough. For my taste.

After the long break we decided to hit the Infiniband-talk. Since we deploy large installations we thought that this gives us some insight about how to deploy Infiniband and how to make up migration-concepts of how to get from Ethernet to Infiniband. Sadly, the talk was just a roundup of the available vendors, their products and performance comparison. That’s not really what we expected, we could’ve just looked that data up elsewhere. While the talk was still going on (I think we were on slide 78 of 145) I decided to check the proceedings and see what this talk would be offering in the next hours. Unfortunately it was about to continue like that.
That was the time when we left the hall and went for the “Hybrid MPI & OpenMP Parallel Programming” lecture.

And wow, that was awesome. We got there pretty late, it must’ve been 16:30, but we were basically stunned by the ideas. Basically MPI and OpenMP both have their advantages and flaws. I certainly thought about combining both technologies, but never did for lazy personal reasons. And then those guys just did it: Awesome. In general, if we got out cluster of SMP-systems with multiple sockets and multiple cores we should be running MPI on the outer computing domain, and OpenMPI on socket- or core-layer. This ain’t not new, but they gave me some insight about why you should do it and what pitfalls my arise.

In the end, I thought I should have sticked to the last tutorial in the first place. Coming back to my first complaint, there wasn’t a real schedule, which is sad. We couldn’t decide to go to which tutorial first since we had no idea when all those lectures were taking place. If the ISC continues to give those tutorials, they should improve their schedule.

Then again, since my collegue and me were both attending the CUDA-talk, we already elaborated on the spot how we could use CUDA in our usecases. We just got rough ideas, but sitting together, listening to that talk wasn’t just a waste of time.
It brought us together.

Now I’m back at home and don’t feel too bad about the ISC lectures – Now I feel sad that I’m not able to attend the rest of the ISC. But I got to work on Monday. Which is in… omg, in about 8 hours.

Good night! I’ll be putting links to this posting tomorrow evening.

Geeklawyer was handed a note in chambers by Tim Kevan, the wretch who stole, yes stole, GL’s writing gig at The Times with his BabyBarista column (but GL is a man of infinite generosity and virtue and had long ago forgiven this despicable act of back-stabbing and betrayal). Tim is leaving The Times.

Readers may well be aware that Rupert Murdoch has set up a paywall around the Times & Sunday Times. It’s a controversial and interesting move. Attitudes to it depend on whether one is a net utopian (labelled ‘Freetards’ by journotard Andrew ‘autistic’ Orlowski of The Register) or pragmatist. Geeklawyer is both. Journalism is super important and quality journalism is an expensive pursuit engaged in by fat egotistical men with trophy wives and Russian oligarch bank balances. It would be nice to fund journalism via website advertising but this seems to be problematic in the current financial climate, hence The Times and The Guardian, among many others, are trying out different business models. In the Murdochian view of Web journalism it is fine if 99.9% of Internet traffic collides with their paywall and bursts into flames. What counts is the 0.1% who decide to cough up the subscriptions that are sufficient to make the model viable. No-one knows if this will work which is why it is an important experiment on Murdoch’s dime. For net utopians such a success would be a disaster, like slapping Mother Teresa in the face with a soiled nappy. If walled gardens sprout up, they say, we are all impoverished by a lack of free flowing ideas and information. Maybe. Or maybe more writers would do more writing if they could see a pay-off.

One of the things not speculated upon in this debate about business models is the position of writers. Writers depend for their living upon their reputation. A walled garden may have the result of massively reducing the people who are aware of their ouvre. Many journalists already maintain separate blogs for a variety of motives such editorial freedom, not have to tow the proprietor’s line, the ability range at large and so on. This is why Tim putting up a ladder and jumping over The Times’ prison wall is so fascinating. He says:

“I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it.

A very principled stand. Tim has the luxury of not having to write for a living so his position may not be tenable for many so it probably doesn’t presage a flight of journalists form the Times. In the meantime, Rupert, I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones, text me?

The PNNL just recently hired Adolfy Hoisie, the winner of the Gordon Bell Award back in 1996. He’ll be doing pretty interesting stuff: Desingning supercomputing from scratch, both in hardware and software. This is an amazingly interesting task since you can drop all burdens, all hardware- and software-restrictions you ever had. No more tailoring your software to fit the buffers into your cachelines. I mean, that’s just: Wow. Not that I’m envious or someting, I really like my job, but getting a grant for a task like this is like winning the lottery.
Adolfy, come on, show us how it’s to be done! Awesome.

I attended my assistant’s wedding yesterday, to her young man. Both of them looked so young, like little kids, but it was very sweet to be invited to the wedding. The love shining from their eyes was amazing; both of them were trying rather valiantly to hold back their tears whilst reciting their vows.

I am not comfortable in organised religious settings – namely churches. My unease is due to my childhood while growing up. Not that I was diddled by priests and/or nuns, but I was a rather quiet & observant child. And I noted from a very early age that my parents’ contemporaries and their children tended to be “good catholics” whilst in church, but once outside were quite vicious with their gossip, antisemitism, intolerance of anything non-catholic and in every respect not respectful towards one another. I grew up with this. I grew up with my uber-catholic mother making me say the rosary on a daily basis on my knees. As an I adult I understand she meant well; she truly believed back then, and even to this day, that daily prayer is the only way towards safeguarding our souls from eternal torment.

I remember a couple years ago musing about the idea of having a small Romuva North America gathering. I was rather rudely talked down to for my “pagan ways” for even contemplating using the camp grounds in Wasaga Beach owned by the local Franciscan Fathers — Kretinga. I wouldn’t be interested in it anyways because it is a catholic campground and I would prefer using something that isn’t so strongly embued with one religion’s energies. I would much rather use a secular campground. One would think that the Golden Rule as espoused by Jesus would be in the heart of all Christians – Love Thy Neighbour as Thy Self – and yet it isn’t. Anything remotely different is shot down as being unacceptable. Much of the world’s strife is down to religion, which is very saddening — considering that each of the religions have a common goal, to become one with the godhead (be it the Judeo-Christian God, Nirvana, etc), and yet they are so busy trying to kill each other that they forget the tenents of their own faiths.

So this brings me back to the church service yesterday. It was held at some Filipino Christian Fundamentalist Church. I went, even though I was highly uncomfortable, because I wanted to support my assistant. The day was all about her and her new husband, and if it makes her happy to have the service at that church so be it. The Pastor who led the service was also the Groom’s father. Why he brought up the issue of Gay Marriage in the middle of his own son’s wedding I don’t know. It was at that point that I tuned out, as I couldn’t stand listening to such vitriol coming from a supposed Man of God. If, as an individual,  you do not support Gay Marriage that is your prerogative — then it’s a simple case of don’t get married to an individual of the same gender. Weddings are supposed to be a celebration of the new path that a couple is about to embark upon, not an opportunity rail at the Federal Government about legalising Gay Marriage, or admonishing the Federal Government for not re-opening the abortion issue.

After the church service I went off to a local shopping mall to wait to be picked up for the reception. The reception was held at a Chinese Restaurant in a city to which there was no available public transit. I waited at this mall for 3.5hrs and I was bored to tears, and rather antsy at the same time. I bought a couple of books, ate a lunch, and generally wandered about. At one point I admonished a woman for standing by my elbow while I was trying to punch in my PIN for my debit card. My exact words were “please do not stand so close to someone when they are trying to type in a PIN, it violates my privacy and the security of my transaction”. The woman was shocked to say the least, and murmured a small sorry. Maybe it was because I was dressed so nicely, maybe it was because I spoke in a clear and firm manner.. I don’t know, it was just odd. After the bookstore I went to the food court to get a sandwich for lunch. While standing in line I was trying to get to the cashier to place my order. Some woman was standing to the side waiting for her order, while her kids were taking up space at the counter — with no one having the ability to approach to place their orders. I got rather annoyed, and in a school marm-ish sort of way I asked the children to not block the counter and to please stand by their mother.

The mall, Scarborough Town Centre, was just odd. I don’t know what it was, but I was able to get my point across to individuals who were either blocking my way or violating my personal space. Not sure if I give off vibes that unnerves people and causes them to give way to my requests, or they are just shocked that someone is asking them to respect privacy and personal space.

Anywho, I was duly picked up at 6:00pm and whisked off to the reception. I was seated at the “white table” — at which was my manager,  her husband, and an italian family. My manager is an excellent accountant, one of the best I’ve ever worked with — she’s quite sharp, is up on the latest developments in IFRS, GAAS, Canadian Tax Law and whatnot. What she isn’t is an excellent people manager. She can be very hard to read most times, as her facial expression at work never changes — one can never tell if she’s annoyed, angry, content, pleased or happy. But take her out of the office context and she’s a rather pleasant person. She seems to have this misconception that I am a drinker and party animal, cos I’m fairly social. It shocked her yesterday when I told her that I don’t drink. But it was rather pleasant, sitting there chit chatting with her and her husband. The others at the table, for the most part they were okay, but one lady went on and on about her dry cracked nipples (cos she’s breastfeeding). I know she was at a table with family and with family there are conversations one can have which are not necessarily appropriate when amongst strangers. There were 3 strangers at the table, we really didn’t need to hear this. And as it was a formal wedding reception it would have been a sign of respect and recognition to the day to actually pour one’s Nestea into a glass, instead of chugging it from a can.

My assistant was quite lovely dancing her “father-daughter” dance. She was over the moon that her 102yr old grandmother flew in from British Columbia, though she was quite worried as she really didn’t want her gran to be on a plane for 4 hours. The woman is quite spry. She has a walker, but other than that she moves around easily, has all her faculties, and still retains a formidable intelligence. During dinner the Bride and Groom went from table to table to have their pictures taken with each group of guests. It was quite lovely doing that, a chance to share in their joy up close.

My only issue, other than the church service, was the music at the reception. It was  highly questionable, and I suspect the selection was made by a karaoke mad filipino.

I left the reception around 8:30pm as Mr Squirrel said he would pick me up. As I mentioned before, there was no available public transport for me to take back to the civilisation of downtown Toronto. I was dependent on either someone picking me up or taking at taxi to Finch Subway Station .. which would have been quite costly.

So, that was my Saturday.

The Nutritious Rice for the World (Rice) project, a World Community Grid BOINC project, ended a few weeks ago. BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a non-commercial program and infrastructure which allows volunteers to donate their computer’s spare computing resources to take part in very interesting, computing intense scientific projects. Many people around the world contributed their CPU-resources to help figure out the structure of proteins of the most common strains of rice. In the end, about 25,761 years of CPU-time were contributed to the project. IBM heavily contributed to this project through their World Community Grid (WCG) program, offering Rice a massive userbase and community.

Rice is one of the most common foods in various parts of the world. It’s in the interest of us all to find varieties and breeds of rice which are most nutritious or resistant against pests; the project’s goal is to find out which varieties of rice interbreed with others to give the best results so that we’ll get new strains of rice which are harder, better, faster, stronger.

A lot of BOINC-users who contributed to the project (like myself) are now asking themselves a lot of questions. Who are the people behind the scenes? How much work is necessary to get a project like this into operation? What was IBM’s role? What will happen with the contributed results? And after all, who will benefit from the project?

I think no one can give better answers than Ram Samudrala, PhD and Principal Investigator of a computational genomics research group at the University of Washington. Rocker, scientist and Emacs-admirer – he was so kind to answer me some questions about the project.

Tell us a little about yourself and how you got involved in the Rice-project.
Ram: I’m a professor researching computational biology at the University of Washington Seattle. My overarching interest has been to understand and model how the genome of an organism (genotype) specifies its behaviour and characteristics (phenotype). We develop computational algorithms to this end that are applied to whole genomes and we work on many organisms. Rice was specifically chosen since our collaborators at the Beijing Genomics Institute had just finished sequence (and we annotated the refined version) and I also got a $1.9 million grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to predict the structure and functions of all proteins encoded by the rice genome. We developed algorithms to do this and we applied it to all rice proteins. Then IBM came along and offered us the means to redo some of our calculations on the most difficult proteins using the WCG and then we ported our code over to work on the Grid.

When was the first time you considered using voluntary distributed computing for your project?
Ram: Since the days of SETI@home, and since we built our own local clusters to do structural computational biology, but porting our code to BOINC was always a inertial challenge.

Did you consider using other DC-infrastructures except BOINC, like distributed.net? If yes, why did you decide using BOINC?
Ram: No, we used BOINC since it was what was supported by IBM WCG.

Have you considered asking the NCSA for computing resources?
Ram: Yep, but it’s a cumbersome process, like applying for a grant, and again, porting software to work on different architectures. The barrier is that we get grant money to do research and not develop software. I have used NIST supercomputing resources in the past.

You said you would need 200 years of computing time using your available resources. Besides voluntary distributed computing and the University of Washington, were there other universities or institutes directly contributing computing-resources to your project?
Ram: Not for this project, no.

You were using algorithms from the Protinfo website. Which one did you actually use, how much effort did you put into customizing it for using it in BOINC? Can you tell us if those algorithms and implementation are released under a free license?
Ram: It’s the Protinfo AB algorithm, which is our ab initio or de novo simulation protocol. IBM spent a fair amount of time porting the code
to work with BOINC. The original algorithms/software are all freely available without any claim of copyright (i.e., in the public domain).

Could you explain “de novo” and “ab initio” for non-scientists, please?
Ram: “De novo” and “ab initio” generally are translated to mean “from first principles”. In the old days, this used to mean using pure physics energy potentials for protein folding. These days, to us, it means any set of general principles that is not biased to a particular protein or organism.

If the algorithms you used are under a free license, did you already manage to publish the modifications, if there are any?
Ram: The modifications involving the porting are with IBM and they are unpublished.

(Ed. note: Since the software was released in the public domain there’s no requirement to publish the modifications.)

IBM helped you out in customizing the protein-prediction algorithms for various platforms. Can you tell us how much they contributed?
Ram: All the customisation was done by IBM engineers. We just gave them the original software and ran sanity checks on the output. I’m a strong free software and anti IP proponent, to the degree that I encourage commercial use without restrictions on the software (people can always use the public domain versions if they want to).

How much time did you save by using the World Community Grid’s infrastructure compared to if you would’ve set it up all on your own, like other projects do?
Ram: IBM took about six months or so to port our software, so I presume it would’ve required that kind of an investment. Keep in mind that they had a lot of prior experience with BOINC. IBM now maintains the code and does the PR and runs the predictions for us. I’d say this would be a full time programmer/sysadm type of person and if I had that extra money, I’d rather spend it on someone doing the basic research.

If there are flaws about BOINC, which would you like to be addressed first?
Ram: I can’t think of any in the way we did it with IBM, but without IBM, the PR machine has to be powerful to get people on board. It’s more than just recruiting people, but also motivating them as IBM does with badges and giving them a sense of community and providing a support infrastructure. This is hard for a research lab to do on their own (it can be done, but is it really the best use of our talents is the questions).

Programming and debugging is an iterative process. Looking at your sourcecode-repository, how many releases of the software were necessary until you got the cow flying?
Ram: For this case, internally we probably had about 10 or so iterations in total, but the basic science part of the software is something that has evolved over 18 years.

How did you do beta-testing, did you use the publicly available beta-projects at WCG? Or, were you actually just doing it in your lab?
Ram: It was mostly in our group. We just submitted sequences for which we knew the answers and we did a dry run initially with the same sequences.

I’m curious there – were these structures predicted by other algorithms or was that done the hard way, using X-ray crystallography?
Ram: These were done the hard way, at the bench. These are our gold standard for when we know we’re right or wrong, so we benchmark our methods against all this. When we did the rice project, we did sequences with known answers to see how well things would work and that there was no chance of anything going wrong.

How was is like getting in touch with the community? Was the feedback helpful? How many people from your team were actually dealing with the community?
Ram: At its peak, we had 3 people dealing with the community, our sysadm and project lead Michal Guerquin, our programmer and scientist Ling-Hong Hung, and myself. Opening our software to the Grid and the community definitely presented some challenges, which I believe will be the focus of our first paper. An interesting tangent of that is that we’ve had to port some of our analysis software to work on GPUs so we could handle all this data. So some good technological developments here that we’ll be writing about shortly.

A lot of people are concerned about “Frankenfood”. Your project’s website explicitly states that this is not about genetic engineering, but about finding the most nutritious rice-strains for interbreeding with other rice-crops. Is there anything you’d like to explain to people who are still concerned?
Ram: We’re simply extending what farmers have been doing for millenia in a more rational way, and also what has been going on in nature for billions of years. The problem to us is scientific and all knowledge that is produced (which from our end will be completely free and transparent) can be used in various ways according to the will of the people. But we have governments and politicians to handle the deeper societal implications. What I mean by this is that people should petition their representatives, as they are doing successfully in many parts of the world, to decide where to go with genetically modified organisms, which I see as ultimately having a socioeconomic/political solution.

Your project is one of the very few with a fixed end, almost all other projects are handing out work-units for new phases. How comes that you’re finished now? Is everything from the rice-genome now analyzed from a computational point-of-view and nothing else left to do?
Ram: Not at all. We obtained a huge amount of data and we’re now pressed to analyse it. I honestly can say that we were overwhelmed with this data. My goal as a scientist though is not just to develop technical tools and produce large tables and graphs but try to come up with something tangible that is prioritised and can be tested at the bench that really changes the make up of rice in a desired manner. The computations and the Grid are the means by which we arrived at this step, but our job now is to figure out where the best low hanging fruit is in collaboration with rice researchers (which we are doing with researchers around the world including IRRI, Phillipines). [Ed. note: IRRI, International Rice Research Institute]

Focussing on the data: Now that you know how those proteins really look like, where do you draw a line and say “this protein is more nutritious than others”? My basic understanding is that the nutritious parts in rice is actually carbohydrates (starch), proteins and some fat. How do I have to imagine this analysis?
Ram: So the proteins we’re talking about are gene products, that carry out almost all the functions in rice (or any other organism). So we use
the protein to refer to a molecule that does this, rather than the nutrition use of the word “protein” which refers to these biological molecules broken down and aggregrated (see “Protein” and “Protein (nutrient)” in Wikipedia).

By nutrition we mean anything that leads to higher range of bioavailable substances like dietary minerals and vitamins. In rice, examples include elements like iron or organics like vitamin A. Incidentally the “golden rice” GMO is a product of Monsanto that has higher beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A (“Golden Rice” at Wikipedia). We’d like to get to something like that by crossbreeding without the use of genetic engineering, working on both micro and macronutrients.

So in the end, we need to be able to create a rice strain that does have enriched nutrients and is perhaps better than current strains in
terms of yield and/or hardiness. Before we go off and start crossing rice, there are a number of molecule biology bench experiments that
can be done to say whether predictions we make about the activity of certain proteins will be correct so we’d do them first.

Do you plan to publish all your results in an Open Access Journal?
Ram: Yep, that would be the ideal. Publishing in Open Access Journals also sometimes costs money. I’m not a big fan of the “pay to publish”
model—it’s not a lot of money and some scientists have grants to do this, but it’s not a good principle.

Thank you very much for this interview!
Ram: Thanks; I enjoyed the questions!

Dr. Ram Samudrala is a tenured Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. He’s head of the Nutritious Rice For The World project and one of the inventors of protein prediction algorithms. He’s a notorious contributor of scientific papers and generally a very nice guy I’d like to buy a drink.

Dieses Werk bzw. Inhalt ist unter einer Creative Commons-Lizenz lizenziert.
The rice picture is copyrighted and CC-BY-SA by Flickr-user kadaoor.
The rice-paddy picture is copyrighted and CC-BY by Flickr-user ~MVI~
The pictures of the teammembers were used by permission of the Rice-team.
The BOINC splashscreen is copyrighted by IBM and the World Community Grid and was used with permission.

This week I have a PST Auditor haunting the corridors of my workplace. In the initial “engagement” letter the emphasis of the audit was to be an affiliate that a co-worker (the individual with very poor computer skills) is responsible for. My manager rang the Ministry of Finance -ORST Division to ask what about the other units that make up the legal entity. Now I’m sucked in. As I have the largest affiliate the emphasis has shifted onto me. As well, the auditor has figured out – rather quickly – that I am extremely comfortable with my computer and SAP. So he’s finding it easier for me to run reports for him, even if the reports are not for my affiliate.

Thankfully the auditor declared on Monday and even yesterday that he wants to do as little work as possible. And I must say, his actions are pointing to that. Every time one of us drops off some report, file, whatnot to him he isn’t at his desk. He shows up around 10am and leaves around 4pm — and during that time he takes an extended lunch, atleast 10 coffee breaks, and a few strolls. I’m hoping to get rid of him either today or tomorrow.

He has decided that some of our vendors did not charge us PST so we have to self-assess. He unilaterally decided, on a sample of one, to calculate the back-PST for 4 years. Luckily, when I joined the company, I did start self-assessing for capital purchases .. so for the past 2 years we’ve been good. And I was able to prove that I was doing that. So that reduces our liability. As well I pointed out that on some of the invoices we were charged PST, so it would be grossly unfair to unilaterally decide we owe $xxxxx.xx. I said I’d rather we go through the vendor files together and actually look at the invoices. I very boldly told him “i know you want to get as much money out of us, and I want to pay you as little as possible .. we have to find a middle ground where neither one of us is happy”.

The daily aspect of this audit is my responsibility, my manager said that I am to take the lead on this. I hate audits, not because they are audits, but because they take me away from my other responsibilities. So this means I need to either work OT or on weekends to catch up. Why this blaise attitude? I’ve been through so many audits – PST, GST, Corporate Tax, Sarbannes-Oxley, performance audits, security audits .. you name it – that it’s just second nature for me. I also know that auditors are not infallible, and not every utterance should be taken .. everything should be questioned. Just like them demanding backup for transactions, I demand the same with regards to their calculations.

Because of my  having gone through many audits my journal entries have loads of backup, to justify why I had done a journal entry — PST self assessments, P&L reclasses, revenue accruals/deferrals, accruals, cash receipts, amortisations etc. My binders are huge because of all the backup. My co-workers, on the other hand, do not produce as much backup as I do. End result is that they tend to scramble trying to figure out why they had done a JE 9 months ago, whereas I can just easily flip to the accompanying pages of the JE and show why I had done something. As I said I hate audits because they are time consuming .. the less time I get pestered, the happier I am.

I am very much looking forward to my holidays this year. This year I get 3 weeks vacation time, and I am using up 2 weeks of it for my annual excursion across the pond. I am to venture forth into the wilds of the United Kingdom with my trusty cohort Tarotcub, and two newbies (who have yet to experience my laissez-faire attitude towards planning). Whilst in England Tarotcub and I will be whisking ourselves off to Deutschland to visit Yalla & Kerstin for about four days. Tarotcub hasn’t been to Germany, and I haven’t seen Yalla & Kerstin since the Lithuanian LBW back in 2006. They were planning on coming here to Canada this coming  August, but airfare prices are too high (1000 euro per person).

What do I hope to “achieve” on my hols? I shall be attending a BrightonPissup organised on Twitter, spend some time with Ruthie – who is hosting a Tea & Tango Garden Party in our honour. I am very much looking forward to seeing Enron: The Musical with my Deviant Chaperone, poking Geeklawyer and spending some time with him, experiencing the delights of Duesseldorf, hopefully go up to Norwich and King’s Lynn. And I know this sounds super tacky, but I believe I also want to visit Cadbury World.

If I manage to squeeze it in, I would also like to see a bit of Cardiff & Bath.

Why did I chose the UK? I got very sick last year, and I tried my damnedest to hold on while in Vilnius – as the medical system there is nowhere close to what I am accustomed to. I kept feeding myself vitamin C, showering lots and sleeping lots .. anything to stave off a collapse. I collapsed when I returned to Canada. This year, if I have medical problems atleast I’ll be in a country with a medical system which is just as good as  here, with urologists who specialise in my birth condition.

Bald ist es soweit -- die Tour mit Pete Morton kann anfangen. Im Vorfeld gab es tolle Werbung und Artikel dazu, unter anderem im Vlothoer Anzeiger. Besonders hat mich der Blog-Artikel der Texttreff-Kollegin von Birgit Schmidt-Hurtienne gefreut -- danke!

Monthend, like most months, has come and gone without much fuss. There were some adjustments I had to make for reporting purposes, to properly reflect the true presentation of my results … adjustments that I couldn’t get into the accounting system due to various reasons.

I have managed to now go one month without requiring the services of a chair in the local ER. Yes, this means I have not had to resort to the excellent services of the local hospital. Yay, me!

We are due to have a PST Audit starting next week, Monday. My co-workers, who are also involved in the audit, are not prepared; they are assuming that I will handle all the discussions with the auditor. According to the engagement letter from the auditor his focus will be on one of my co-workers’ affiliates, not mine. This means she will be the focus and will have to explain herself. When I told her that she needs to gather all her documentation to show capital additions and disposals for 2007-2009 her response was — “I never did disposals, Mrs L did those”. I patiently explained to her that using that as an excuse will not jive with the auditor; he will not care, all he is interested in is seeing the working papers to justify any additions, disposals and adjustments to capital assets.

One co-worker did not come to work yesterday as her wee son was quite ill. Unfortunately this meant that she was not able to complete her bank reconciliations, and therefore her financial results for April 2010 YTD were not published. I got a rather terse email from my counterpart at the regional HQ (NY) asking when I intended on publishing. I told him that they are not my affiliates, and he should be patient.

I have been at my current position for 2 years now. In comparison with the other inmates my tenure, thusfar, has been rather brief. We all learnt how to use the new accounting system. And yet, oddly enough, there are things I can do in the accounting system they cannot. I have the ability to work in any North American company working off the same accounting system — we are all on SAP, which is located on the NY servers. This means instead of invoicing, email and whatnot, I can easily just do a cross-charge journal entry. I also have the ability to run PO reports, create assets, dispose of assets and work in the other various subledgers (accounts receivable, accounts payable, WIP, COGS). There has also been some murmurings that the entire department needs to sit down with me so I can train them all on how I do these miraculous things.

And to continue with the head shaking this week, that happens on a nearly daily basis, I nearly smacked a co-worker. She ran her Balance Sheets for 2007 & 2008, because part of the auditor request was to have the financial statements ready for him this coming Monday. For those of you who are not comfortable with this … there are 7 components which comprise the financial statements — assets, liabilities & equity make up the Balance Sheet; revenue, expenses, gains, losses make up the Income Statement. Basically, there are two financial statements for each fiscal period – Balance Sheet & Income Statement. When I asked her where her complete financials were she said ‘there, there they are’. I had asked her why only the Balance Sheets? Oh, those are the financials. I informed her she needs her full financials .. what’s that she asks? She’s been working as an accountant for the past 20 years .. I was ready to rip her  hair out.

On a happy note, I ran into a former colleague from my time at Sears. We both started in the Inventory Accounting Department eons ago, both working on our CGA designations. I left that crap hole in 2003 for Pfizer, and he left in 2005. We would periodically bump into each other during CGA exams. But this week it was at 2 CGA seminars. We have to complete a certain number of CPDs (continuing professional development) per year. I wanted seminars that are cheap, do not require me to do homework or tests, and hopefully learn something interesting. And at yesterday’s seminar, Upcoming Changes to Standards for NFPOs, I met him there. Today it was something on barcodes. To be honest I zoned out, but I got free food, some CPDs and to catch up with the colleague.

The VSCSE, the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering, is once again offering courses. For this time, they added quite a lot of new sites, where you can attend the courses – 21 sites in all over the US are now available as classrooms. The VSCSE is provided and funded by the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the State of Illinois, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), and Internet2 Commons.

Their press-release:

Want to learn how to use graphics processors for scientific computing? Scale your parallel code to tens of thousands of CPU cores? Deal with ginormous datasets? The Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering offers these courses and more during its summer program for 2010!

Since 2008, nearly 250 students and researchers have participated in the annual Summer School offered by the Virtual School. During Summer School, students learn new techniques for applying high-performance computing systems to their work. Due to overwhelming demand for courses in previous Summer Schools, we have added 15 sites (for a total of 21 sites) to the 2010 program in order to accommodate additional students. For each course, students attend on-site in one of 10 state-of-the-art, distributed high-definition (HD) classrooms, located at academic and research institutions across the country. These HD classrooms are equipped with live, high-definition videoconferencing technology that provides a high-quality learning experience.

Students attend technical sessions presented by leading researchers in computational science and engineering and use cutting edge, high-performance computing systems provided by TeraGrid resource providers. Course participants apply the techniques learned in hands-on lab sessions, assisted by skilled teaching assistants who work one-on-one and in small groups to answer questions and solve problems posed during the sessions. This summer’s courses are:

• Petascale Programming Environments and Tools, July 6–9, 2010
• Big Data for Science, July 26–30, 2010
• Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-core Processors, August 2–6, 2010

The cost for each course is only $100. To participate, prospective students must first be enrolled in the Virtual School. Enrollment is free and can be completed at https://hub.vscse.org/. After enrolling, students select their courses and indicate which of the distributed HD classrooms they would like to attend.

Snacks and an evening reception will be provided; participants are responsible for travel and lodging costs (low-cost dorm accommodations will be provided where possible). Because of the large geographic diversity of participating sites, it is likely that little travel will be required.

For no additional cost, on-site participants can take online short courses on MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA that are designed to help them meet course prerequisites.

For more information on the 2010 courses, including the sites participating in each course and details on enrollment, go to: www.vscse.org/summerschool/2010

Bald ist es soweit -- die Tour mit Pete Morton kann anfangen. Im Vorfeld gab es tolle Werbung und Artikel dazu, unter anderem im Vlothoer Anzeiger. Besonders hat mich der Blog-Artikel der Texttreff-Kollegin von Birgit Schmidt-Hurtienne gefreut -- danke!

Today is Mother’s Day, here in the vastness of Her Majesty’s Colonies .. aka, Canada. As a dutiful Baby Bean I treated my mom, Momma Bean, to a Mother’s Day Brunch. We went to a lovely restaurant and she quite enjoyed herself.

My concerns for her stem from my observing her today at brunch. Her hands were shaking so much she could barely hold her butter knife. She had a hard time holding her cup of coffee and ending up spilling half of it on the table. She had a hard time getting up and sitting down.  She stumbled a few times, as if she were very dizzy. Momma Bean is nearly 70, so not that old. But she’s beginning the exhibit the same stubbornness that Poppa Bean had.

Momma Bean got very sick 2 weeks ago, high fever, chills, shaking, coughing etc. She refused to go to a doctor. She still refuses. I have reminded her that the last time she ignored her body’s messages she had a heart-attack. I want her to take care of herself. My mom has always been a bit of a hyperchondriac, so I’ve never had to worry about her seeing her GP. But now she’s displaying the same tendencies as Poppa Bean — refusing to go to the doctor, downplaying her health issues, saying she’s old, what’s the point. If my father had showed any fight he might have lived longer, going to the doctors when his pain first manifested.

I buried one parent this year, I really don’t relish doing this again any time soon.

My demanding that she promise on my father’s soul that she will see the doctor has not worked. She refuses.

Some of these reviews can also be found on Amazon.

In April 2010 I read the following books:

1. Jill the Reckless, by P.G.Wodehouse - Very good: 4/5

Like much of Wodehouse's work, this is a light-hearted, fairly short work, that you'll be able to knock off in a coupla days. It has such Wodehouse perennials as a domineering aunt, an uncle, and Bertie Wooster (although with a different name). I dare say little more without giving some of the essntials away, but you will enjoy this book. If you don't, you are broken.

2. Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross - Good: 3/5

This sequel to Singularity Sky would work just as well as a stand-alone novel, while also maintaining continuity of character and setting with the first. The style, however, is rather different. Gone is the humour, replaced with a much darker over-all feel, and with far more action. While this does make the book more immediately accessible, I feel that there's something missing now.

It's still worth buying, mind. There is also room left for another book in the series, although Stross has no plans for one at the moment.

3. The Song of Phaid the Gambler, by Mick Farren - Good: 3/5

As Farren was so associated with the "counterculture" and "UK underground" you expect this to be an incoherent mess, but it's not. It still lacks overall structure, being more a sequence of events that just happen to involve the title character instead of an integrated whole, and relies on a few rather improbable coincidences and conspiracies. There's also a couple of plot-lines that are just left to fizzle out. Despite all that it's a mostly pleasant and diverting read, and worth buying second-hand. Which is good, because you can't get it new.

4. The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks - Excellent: 5/5

Narrated in the first person, this macabre tale hooks you early on and you jolly well stay hooked right up to the end. It's very short, but feels much longer than it really is because you don't expect such depth of character, or to sympathise so much with the narrator, in a mere novella, and the minor inconsistencies don't really matter much - it's not like the nutjob narrator can be expected to tell the truth all the time anyway. Utterly grotesque and horrible, beautifully written and composed, well worth reading.

5. Palimpsest, by Charles Stross - Meh: 2/5

Time-travelling librarian history enforcers? Errm, well, OK, it's an idea that could be developed into something very interesting, certainly. But presented in short-story format like this, it's unfortunately rather confusing, and stops just when it should be getting started. This has an awful lot of potential if developed into a full novel, but in this format, it's not particularly good.

6. Overtime, by Charles Stross - Good: 3/5

This short Laundry story was going to get at least four stars, right until the end. Unfortunately, the ending is rather hurried. Stross gets everything else right though, so it's worth reading. And you can read it for free on Tor's website.

7. Down on the Farm, by Charles Stross - Very good: 4/5

Another Laundry short, this is much better than Overtime. There's more human interest, and more explanation of what the hell's going on, so when we get to the end it's far more fulfilling. Very good, and free on Tor's website.

Geeklawyer had intended to stand as MP in his constituency, seriously — he had, but got distracted by the bloody punters and one of his businesses and so was unable to get the formalities done in time. The critical questions for a disappointed nation are “How do we vote GL?” “Is there any point in politics now that the one hope for deep lasting democratic reform has gone?”

Geeklawyer, with his charming & characteristic modesty, won’t pretend he hasn’t let you all down badly but he will make amends by telling you how to vote.

The main three parties have had meetings with GL to try and persuade him to come to their aid: the BNP, UKIP and the Monster Raving Loony Party. Clearly, while beating up Blacks and committing economic suicide by withdrawing from Europe are compelling platforms, now is not the time for such advanced political thinking. Their day will come. Hopefully in a few millennia, when Geeklawyer has gone to the Bar in the Sky.

The Observer & Grauniad have come down in favour of Nick Clegg who, like his clone ‘Dave’ Cameron, is a man for the people rather than of the people. Nick, the Guardian tells us, is the candidate of change. Loose change, one imagines. Unfortunately, and to the frankly bad tempered dismay of the parties, Geeklawyer could not bless them with his support.

Let it be known that Geeklawyer is hoping for a hung Parliament.  The case against a hung Parliament is oft rehearsed: that without a workable mandate we get Greek government that it will lead to economic collapse and that Britain has never fared well under peacetime coalitions. At least that is what the two main parties desperately want you to believe but a recent Independent piece casts real doubt on that. Coalitions have some of the strongest economies. Likewise a hung Parliament should deliver electoral reform that breaks us out of the Whip delivered dogmatism of Neo-Labour and Tories.

So who should you vote for? Go to the Hang ‘Em site to find out. Geeklawyer rejoices in living in a marginal constituency that may topple a Neo-Labour brown-noser; you may not be so lucky.

At the next election you will, of course, vote Geeklawyer.

I saw Dr Tien today at Sunnybrook. As many of you all know I have been having abdominal pain since early January of this year. Ultrasounds have been done, many blood draws, and other fun samples taken. The tests have shown that my gall bladder’s lining is thickened, that I am fighting off some sort of infection, and that there were elevated liver enzymes a few weeks ago when I was checked out by ER doctors at Mount Sinai.

Foolishly I thought, as did all the other doctors, that I have gall bladder stone issues. But not Dr Tien. He’s decided that it isn’t my gall bladder but one of these reasons – abdominal adhesions from multiple surgeries (they were cleared out 2.5 years ago by Dr Herschorn & Dr Lee), sepsis from last year (because I keep showing UTIs in my cultures .. I pointed out that as a Bladder Exstrophy patient with a mitrafonoff stoma that I am more highly proned towards UTIs than the average person), or gastritis.

The upshot is that there will not be any surgery in my immediate future. To say I am pissed is understating it.

That is the question I was asked by my manager today – Do you really need the gall bladder surgery? Can’t you just cope with the pain? I was a little taken aback and I said no, I really don’t relish the idea of another painful attack.

This past weekend I was reminded that my pain meds are narcotics and can be habit forming. I know my friend meant well, but really, I do know what I am doing with regards to advocating for my own healthcare.

Years ago, when I was a Little Bean, my third urologist thought it madness that my mother was completely dependent on doctors — accepting their words as gospel, and never complaining if there was any mishandling by nurses. It was Dr Hardy who taught me that it is okay to say “no, I don’t want this surgery; no, I will not agree until you give me all the facts; no, you do not have permission to touch my abdomen (this drives Residents and Interns nuts, but it is my legal right to determine who and who does not have access to my body). And I have the legal right to jump off a table during an ultrasound and say to the technician “you are hurting me”.

I’m very good at advocating for myself. I am very good at knowing when I need medical intervention — and gall bladder surgery is one of those interventions I require. I cannot stomach the idea of another gall bladder attack cos the little stones keep getting embedded in the ducts. I’ve done my research, I know the consequences of the surgery. I’ll admit it would kind of be nice to have an incision that won’t require lots of attention as it would be a fresh cut, not a slicing over an existing incision.

So dear friends, I would ask that you not make suggestions with regards to pain care unless you yourselves have experience with narcotic pain relievers. I know you mean well, but it gets my back up and I feel like I have defend my decisions. It’s bad enough I have to squabble with the medical profession, I really do not want to do that with friends and acquaintenances.

Es tut sich was bei der Fiddlerin -- nachdem ich den langen Winter hauptsächlich auf verschiedenen Sessions gespielt und neue musikalische Richtungen ausprobiert habe, heißt es jetzt: "Back to the roots!"

Zusammen mit Pete Morton spiele ich ein paar Konzerte in NRW -- die Fiddle ist aus der Winterpause zurück und hat ein paar neue Tunes auf Lager. Es gibt Songs zum Mitsingen und Schunkeln, fetzige Jigs und Reels zum Tanzen und Feiern. Hier sind die Termine:

---

The fiddle player is back -- during the long and cold winter I mostly played at sessions in Cologne. Now I'm back on stage and on tour with Pete Morton. We'll be playing songs, jigs and reels for you in various cities in NRW, Germany:

• 14.05.2010: The Harp, Venloer Str. 22, 50672 Köln, (Belgisches Viertel), Eintritt frei / admission: free, 21:00
• 15.05.2010: Henblas Pub and Restaurant, Hofstr. 17, 58809 Neuenrade-Altenaffeln, Eintritt 7 EUR / admission: 7 EUR, 20:30
• 16.05.2010: Vlotho Inn, Herforder Str. 17, Vlotho (near Bad Oeynhausen), Frühshoppen (Early-Bird-Folk), 11 Uhr

One of my co-workers has been at our company for 20 years, working in her current position for the past 6  years. One would think that with all these many years of experience the woman could actually think for herself and figure out a reconciliation.

Back in early 2009 we switched over to a new accounting system, SAP, and during the conversion some items didn’t go through correctly. For those of us who were fortunate enough to actually understand what makes up our Balance Sheets it was a simple case of making correcting journal entries and reversing Dec’09 accruals in the new system. I have the two largest reporting entities, with many complex entries and calculations, and yet I was able to work through the conversion and carry on for the rest of 2009 without having to worry about any “plugs” I would be carrying on my Balance Sheets. But not my co-worker.

To start, there is this concept known as “Deferred Income”. It sits as a liability on the Balance Sheet, and is the result of either having done a pre-billing (billing before actual work is done) or the client(s) have forwarded payment at their own volition to cover the initial project costs (cab fare, presentation costs, digital transfers etc). Deferred Income is an accounting concept which indicates that the company has not yet fulfilled the necessary steps to actually have earned the money as revenue. As part of the conservatism principle, you cannot recognise revenue until you have fulfilled all obligations — ie, you have actually done the work required to earn the revenue. So to keep things clear we have sub-accounts — Client Advances and Client Deferred Income; the former with regards to clients prepaying us, and the latter for when we do pre-bills. I keep these two accounts separate, and reconcile each one individually so I can easily tie out to what are true Client Advances and what is true deferred Billings Revenue. My idiot co-worker mingles the two, and the end result is that when she looks at the conversion journal entry from January 2009 she cannot figure out what the lump sum number is.

I have suggested that as it was Corporate Finance at a our Regional Headquarters who did the entry it would only be natural to actually ask for a copy of the entry, along with backup, to determine what happened. My co-worker waffled and said she feels ashamed that she would have to call NY and would much rather try to figure it out on her own. I, as a damn fine accountant, pointed out that there is no added value to her doing this as the most expedient course of action would to actually contact NY.

The situation as well also pertains to the way she treats Deferred Income. For all the affiliates working out of our office the entries done to the two sub-accounts are accruals, which reverse out each month and are reaccrued the following month at the correct YTD number. No other entries are suppose to flow through those accounts, and the numbers should easily be verifiable by comparing them to the Work In Progress Subledger and the Billings Report. What my co-worker has been doing is drawing down the number in Deferred Income to get her Revenues to balance to what is expected by Senior Management. I told her there are two problems with this — reported Revenues should never be at what is expected, but at what is actual (ie, if you forecast that your March 2009 Revenues will be $100K and they come out to $63K it doesn’t matter, the number to be reported is $63K) and I warned her that one of the issues with Enron was that they were massaging their Financial Reports to balance to their Proformas.

Another situation, which has nothing to do with Revenue, is her Fixed Asset Reconciliation. I quickly did it for her last year, as the Director of Finance had been on her case to provide a reconciliation. I did it once for her, and told her I expected her to continue doing so each month; she hasn’t. Now she needs to provide 4 months worth of reconciliations and told I got the dreaded whine … “beanieeeeeeee help meeeeee! I don’t know how to do this reconciliation”. I have crap loads to do before monthend; I have to meet with an employment agency rep tomorrow to discuss getting a temporary replacement for my assistant when she’s off for a month for her honeymoon; I have to reconcile intercompany; reconcile billings for tomorrow’s PST payment; meet with the IT Director to discuss discrepancies in the Fixed Asset Reporting System; and, to find $300K to cut from our 2010 forecasts across 7 affiliates. Teaching someonem who theoretically should already know how to do this, how to do a reconciliation will probably push me towards the edge.

While Geeklawyer isn’t the greatest fan of the BNP New Labour or other illiberal fascist organisations he was somewhat perplexed that the BNP are imminently going to be at the pointy end of an injunction from Proctum & Gamble, the brand owners of Marmite, for “not providing the sort of publicity that’s useful”.

Apparently the wags at the BNP inserted a photo of a Marmite jar in a Youtube election video along with the slogan “Love it or Hate it”. P&G took offence at this saying they did not give permission for the image of a Marmite jar to be used or support any political party. It goes pretty much without saying that had the party concerned been not the BNP but one of the main three, or perhaps the Monster Raving Loony party, they may have been more sanguine.

Which got Geeklawyer to thinking: what is the cause of action here?

Copyright? Probably not. The Marmite slogan “love it or loathe it” wasn’t reproduced in substantial form, even if it was inherently copyrightable. If the BNP nicked a Proctum & Gamble image then yes there would be copyright infringement but if it’s their own, then, no.

Trademarks? They aren’t in the same classes, marmite may not be famous and there is the question of whether in any event it is use in the course of trade, blah blah. Not unarguable but a bit weak.

Likewise Passing Off law: only a Marmite in a hurry would confuse a residual waste yeast based product with a political party aimed at liquidating non-white citizens. Or maybe Geeklawyer is just unusually astute.

So while it may be insufferable the BNP may have right on their side.

Eeeuuwww.

Assembly, dir Feng Xiaogang - Very good: 4/5

Set during and in the decade after the Chinese civil war, the film is based on the true story of a war hero fighting for the honour of his company, who despite fighting to the last man to cover the retreat of their regiment, were listed as Missing In Action instead of killed by the enemy. It is well-written (and well-translated and subtitled too - including, amusingly, a few lines in English spoken by a Yankee tank commander during a scene set in the Korean War), well shot, has an especially good musical score, but is perhaps a little let down by the acting - although I'm sure it doesn't help that I was having to read subtitles instead of just watching. The lead character Gu Zidi is particularly sympathetic, as is his company's political officer, but the rest are somewhat one-dimensional. Overall, the story is touching, and that it provokes an emotional response shows that it's Good Stuff. Recommended.

I got home this evening to find a leaflet from the Conservative party waiting for me, urging me to vote for them in the local elections. It says, amongst many other things:

If as the polls suggest the Conservative Council is re-elected, we believe Thornton Heath would be best served by having Conservative councillors ... rather than opposition councillors who have no influence

So I've emailed them to ask:

This is remarkably similar to something that Simon Burns MP said in one of his election leaflets years ago when I lived in Chelmsford. Strangely, despite (according to him, and now you) voters being best served by a representative who is a member of the party in power, he didn't immediately resign his seat when he won in 1997 but the Tories lost over-all. Will you promise to do what he should have done, stick to your guns, and, in the interests of Thornton Heath, resign if the Tories don't get a majority on the council?

If not, why should I vote for you, seeing that you'd be effectively promising to represent me badly?

If they reply, I'll post their reply here. If they don't reply - well, you can interpret that however you like.

Overall, I find their promises for local government reasonable - at least those that they have any control over - although some of the headlines are predicated on a Tory win nationally as well. My biggest quibble is that they want to replace schools with "Academies". Why go to the extra expense instead of just fixing schools that aren't doing so well?

Seven Swords, dir Tsui Hark - Good: 3/5

Another "homage" (mis-pronounced, no doubt, "omarj" in an attempt to sound all French and edumacated) to Seven Samurai, this is just as bad as the original. It was originally supposed to be 240 minutes long, but was cut to just 150, which may go part way to explain some of the jarring jumps and gaping plot-holes. These would make it an even worse film than Seven Samurai, if it wasn't for the fact that at least it's fairly well shot. There's also some ridiculous martial arts action, which always helps. The dude with the killer umbrella raises this up to getting three stars, just about.

Seven Samurai, dir Akira Kurosawa - Meh: 2/5

This is, apparently, a great masterpice, and "unanimously hailed" as such according to one reviewer. Nonsense. While it does have its good points and has been undeniably influential, it's not actually a very good film by modern standards. It's not helped by being too long to support its story, and by too many cuts between pointless short shots when nothing is happening. I really wanted to like this, but I couldn't.

The Magnificent Seven, dir John Sturges - Excellent: 5/5

The story, modulo a few details and one extra sub-plot in this remake, is pretty much identical to that of Seven Samurai, even down to some of the dialogue being almost the same. Unlike the original, however, The Magnificent Seven is a film that everyone should watch, and which you will enjoy. It is much shorter, with many of the pointless slow bits left out, is better lit and shot, and is by far the better film. Highly recommended.

The second OpenRheinRuhr, where I happen to belong to the organization team, will take place on Saturday, 13th and Sunday, 14th of November 2010. We just published our Call for Papers, so if you feel like you’d like to give a lecture or organize a workshop, you’re invited to submit your papers.

Here the Call for Papers in it’s full glory: