Just A Summary

Remember boys and girls, always, always, always have a backup.

One of my earliest memories is of standing on a low stool, stirring a teaspoonful of sugar into fresh yeast to wake it up while mum heated a pan of milk to blood heat before everything all got mixed together to make a lovely, enriched bread dough that, now I think about it, I could probably make tomorrow without recourse to a recipe book.

She’d cover it with a teatowel and set it to rise, until the dough would be lifting the centre of the towel slightly. Once it was risen she’d tip the dough out and knock it back before dividing it up into buns and plaits (if I’d been good, I was allowed to do some plaiting…). She’d lay ‘em out on baking sheets to recover slightly, then, just before they went into the oven they’d get a quick egg or milk wash and a quick sprinkling of poppy seeds.

How long did it take me to finally get my finger out and move this blog over to the new box?

I think the only answer that makes sense is “Too long”.

Now I just have to wrestle the godawful CSS into submission.

My new firewall seems to have forgotten all about port forwarding rules for a week or so. Which isn’t good when that’s how this site is served.

All better now. I hope.

Once upon a time, when the world was still enormously old but I was a good deal younger, a friend with whom I played D&D pressed a copy of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic on me, telling me it was the best thing ever. So off I went and read it and it was indeed the best thing ever.

Well, I was 14 at the time.

And there’s nothing new in this post really. I’ve been indulging myself in a gadget buying spree including finally getting myself a decent film scanner and starting to get some of my old negatives and slides scanned in. I’ll be putting more stuff online as time goes on, but for the time being here’s a few photos from Silverstone a couple of years ago.

I’ve also finally bought myself a digital camera, in theory so I can’t use the ‘but film/dev costs so much!’ excuse. Asking how much the camera, power grip and decently short lens are going to cost me is, of course, beside the point. Here is an album of photos that will mostly be be of interest to my family. The last one is probably decent even if you’re not related to the subject though.

Our experience as contractors, engineers and architects during the last 15 years has proved one thing over and over again: The things placed on drawings are inevitably – always – wrong in many particulars. Drawings serve as an important rough sketch of something that will be built, but must be executed with constant attention to room shape, light, wall and ceiling detail, openings – above all to the feelings which arise in each place, in the construction, as it is taking shape. These feelings are too complicated to predict and cannot be predicted. When a building is built from plans that are conceived on the drawing board and then simply built, the result is sterile at best – silly most of the time – and sometimes unthinkably bad. This is something familiar in virtually all large buildings that have been built since 1950. It is inevitable, given the process of construction used to build them. And it is inevitable that this process must lead to unsatisfactory results.

—Christopher Alexander, Gary Black & Miyoko Tsutsui The Mary Rose Museum

Another installment in my ongoing series of reviews of books that Amazon will take an age to deliver.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”        —T.H. White, The Once and Future King

T.H. White is one of my favourite writers. It’s easy to be dismissive of The Once and Future King, based on the Disney adaptation—which, like their version of The Jungle Books, is great fun but a travesty of the original. However, as I hope the extract shows, there’s rather more to him than that.

I really don’t have time for those complete and utter arseholes who abuse trust. In my narcissistic way I was going through my referer logs to find out who was linking to me and what they were saying about me, as I’m sure everyone does. Anyhow, I came across one URL that looked slightly out of place, claiming as it did to come from a php programming site…

I’ve bounced off writing this article several times in the past and I’m still trying to find a good way into it. Here’s the (n+1)th take on it anyway.

Trust is everything. Trust is what keeps the wheels turning. Trust is when all parties are pointing in the right direction and nobody’s playing CYA games. Trust is opening a joint account and moving in together. Trust is when you stop using contraception…