"It's like a dog, but smaller"
Posted on 2008-09-15 at 11:36:47
Just taken my new dog for a walk! Well actually, I had to carry him there, because I actually went to the pet shop in town to get him a better lead (he can climb through the one we bought him the other day: he is very tiny). It was soooooooo embarrassing!
Got to the pet shop and I ended up buying him a kitten harness of all things - it was the only thing that fit him. I'm not sure why a kitten would need a harness, I can't imagine that much winching would be required on the part of a small cat, but it did the job and I was able to walk him back.
On the way, no less than 7 groups of people stopped me to say "Aaawww! How old is he? Is it a he? What's his name? What is he? Oh yeah, I can see the Jack Russel/Chihuahua in him..." etc. Looks like this dog is making me popular! Actually, it's a really good way to get to know people in the area. Hell, I even spoke to some of my neighbours yesterday - that's a first!
So all was going swimmingly until I received a text message from Amy (My future brother-in-law's girlfriend), who also lives in town, saying "Oh my god, I've just seen this really butch guy walkin through rammi with the smallest dog ever! He looked so gay! Ha ha!"
As Gizmo would say: Grrrrr...
Posted on 2008-07-17 at 13:31:56
I went to see Death Cab for Cutie at the Apollo in Manchester last night.
Veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrryyy good. In fact, they were one of that rare breed of bands that sound better live.
They were supported by a band called Styrofoam who were also pretty agreeable, might have to get their album too maybe?
Actually, the only reason I ended up going was that Tim had a spare ticket, but it was such a good gig. I really should go see more bands that I like, but as usual, I'm skint and have no time. Oh well, soon....
Posted on 2008-07-07 at 11:04:56
Recently Marj has begun to bitch about the toilet seat. I know that everyone else has this*, but honestly, I thought we were above it. It happens to the best of us I guess, but still, I can't quite get my head around why women care so much. Well, okay, I'll accept that sometimes, when the seat isn't down she ends up practically falling into the bog 'cos she's only 'ickle. But after this happens once or twice, you learn to check, surely?
So she wants me to put the seat down after I've used it. The thing is though, that this isn't fair!!
I suggested to her that it was better than the alternative of leaving the seat down, as it'll get...uh... wet, AND by having to put the seat up before hand, I'm actually working against gravity, so that counts as more if you ask me.
She refused to acknowledge this, so in order to prove that I'm right and she's wrong, I've decided to sum it all up into a series of simple mathematical equations:
If she gets her way and the seat is always down:
DarrenWees = (EffortToLiftSeat * Gravity) + EffortToWee + EffortToReplaceSeat
MarjanWees = EffortToWee
RESULT: Vastly more effort required by Darren
But, if I get my way and the seat is either up or down depending on who used it last:
Assuming it's left up:
DarrenWees = EffortToWee
MarjanWees = EffortToReplaceSeat + EffortToWee
Assuming it's left down::
DarrenWees = (EffortToLiftSeat * Gravity) + EffortToWee
MarjanWees = EffortToWee
Combined:
DarrenWees = (EffortToLiftSeat * Gravity) + (2 * EffortToWee)
MarjanWees = EffortToReplaceSeat + (2 * EffortToWee)
RESULT: More effort required by Darren
And for completeness - If always left down:
DarrenWees = EffortToWee + EffortToMopUpDarrensWeeOffSeat
MarjanWees = EffortToWee
OR
DarrenWees = EffortToWee
MarjanWees = EffortToWee + EffortToMopUpDarrensWeeOffSeatFirst
RESULT: Equality, but potentially wet bum and therefore disqualified
If always left up:
DarrenWees = EffortToWee
MarjanWees = EffortToReplaceSeat + EffortToWee + (EffortToLiftSeat * Gravity)
OR
DarrenWees = EffortToWee
MarjanWees = EffortToClimbOutOftoiletAndScreamAtDarren + EffortToReplaceSeat + EffortToWee + (EffortToLiftSeat * Gravity)
RESULT: Vastly more effort required by Marjan
So as you can see from this simple set of calculations, my way is a noble compromise and actually requires more effort on my part (due to the effects of gravity), but I don't mind making this sacrifice for the woman I love. however, her way puts me out even further and so is unfair.
Thus, therefore, henceforth, I am right, she is wrong. Loooooooooooooooooozer!
---
* - Except homosexual couples, "Up/down: who cares?!"
"The Inevitable Return Of... er... Me"
Posted on 2008-05-21 at 16:38:50
With a mere 4 months of funding left on my PhD I've been a very busy boy recently. In fact, I haven't really had a chance to do anything to my blog since we got back from New Zealand. Okay, so I've dropped the odd post here and there, but most of them were unfinished.
On top of my mounting PhD woes, there was also the fact that my other site was playing up. I was with 123-reg and although they were cheap, my site kept going down. I was using Wordpress and that could have been to blame, although I doubt it. Now, I don't want to say anything libelous, so lets just say that I abandoned ship pronto and instead moved to the vastly superior (although slightly more expensive) webfaction . while I was at it, I opted for a new site altogether to host my blog. The new site is darrenhoyland.info and I hope to keep hold of this one for good. I liked autonomouse, and I think I'll keep using it as my username for things, but I was fed up of explaining why my site was called www.autonomouse.com. If I have to do this with darrenhoyland.info, then I'll know to never talk to that person ever again.
I have been keen to learn Python and Django for a while and so I thought I'd add this to my ever increasing pile of things to do and so instead of going for another content management system, I'd go back to trying to build the site myself. I'm not sure why this is important to me to do this, but it is. So I did. Using Django will be soooooo much easier than PHP - I've learned that much already. Anyway, so it may look a little bit rubbish for now, but most of it is working and things are only going to get better (probably around the same time as I work out how to use a cascading style sheet).
One of the reasons why blogs are so popular is that they are anonymous. Seeing as though I've used my real name as the name of the site, I guess that restricts me to a certain extent. However, it does allow me to have a place where I can also put up my CV and put up my research posters, papers (when I submit them!), presentations, dissertations and theses... heh, theses... so I'll just have to watch what I say.
I don't have any extreme views anyway, so I should be alright... probably...
So then. Hopefully, this should mean I'm back in business. Don't expect another post for a while yet tough; we're entering thesis writing territory!
Posted on 2008-02-02 at 00:00:00
This morning, Marj somehow managed to pull off the amazing feat of locking her keys inside the car with the engine running. To be fair, it wasn’t her fault, the door locking mechanism has started to become buggered of late, and as it was snowing this morning*, she wanted to warm the engine to melt the ice before she went to work. So she started the engine, closed the door, then came back inside for a few minutes. When she went back out, the door was locked.
This meant that at the obscene hour of 7am on a saturday morning, I was marched outside in my dressing gown, in the snow, and ordered to make it open within the next 5 seconds as she was already late. The car is a Renault Clio, so its got a button which unlocks all of the doors by the gear-stick. We managed to thread a coat hanger through the door, but we only had the one and there was no way it would reach. Next up we went for the driver’s side door lock pressy thing - you know the one. Anyway, it looks like that was specifically designed so that if you did manage to get a coar hanger in, there was nothing to hook it around. At this point, Marjie’s jumping up and down with a manic look in her eyes (She doesn’t like being late).This made me worried, and so I went in to get the hammer. I put an old tee shirt over the rear corner window and gave it what can only be described as a twat. Fuck all happened. Okay, try harder, I swung back and with all available force and hit it again. Nada. Finally, having summonned the entire power of greyskull, I lifted the hammer up high and struck the window with a blow so mighty that would make the pagan god Thor look like Timmy Mallett.Didn’t even mark it.I go in to get a bigger hammer and a pointy thing to put in between that and the window and at this point, Marj remembers we have Green Flag recovery cover. She gave ‘em a ring and after an hour or so, the mechanic turns up to see the car sat in the only non-snowy patch of ground (at least that worked!) with a coat hanger still protruding from the top of it like a victim of a failed home abortion.
Fortunately, they said ‘cos she’s been a member for 2 years and hasn’t used it yet, they’d do it for free. Free is significantly cheaper than the cost of replacing a window, so that was lucky, eh?
—
* - It’s snowing!!! yey!
Posted on 2008-01-28 at 00:00:00
It’s a little late, but merry secular yuletide/xmas greets and happy new year everybody! I know its the end of January now, but it’s all Tiscali’s fault.
Pretty much since we got back from New Zealand, we haven’t had a working landline until today, and I’ve been so busy at work that I’ve actually had to work, as opposed to playing around writing to my blog and such like. This was in part, something to do with not being able to work from home as we had no internet.
Today, we finally got t’internet back (went with BT in the end), so when I get the chance, I’m going to have to populate the earlier dates with stuff I’ve half-written when I got the time over xmas.... although I probably will never get around to it and they'll languish in a half-written state forever...
Oh yeah, I've officially moved in with Marj now ( ;-) ). It seemed a bit silly to be engaged and not moved in (despite already being here). To celebrate, we bought a tortoise. It seemed a bit mean to buy a cat or a dog in out pokey little flat. Marj named it Yoda, presumably because its small and green, rather than because it was purchased a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
This is Yoda (he's a tortoise)
Posted on 2007-12-23 at 00:00:00
No, this isn’t the start of a wham song, but it is a blast from the past.
My mates from Grimsby who I went to school with (most of ‘em anyway) and I have something of an annual tradition - we like to ruin xmas.
Last year, I excelled myself, and just to prove it, here’s an excerpt from an email I sent around to some other mates after xmas last year in my pre-blogging days:
Went for a curry on xmas eve, ended up at Grimsby’s premier (only) strip club (very classy). Drunk enough to phone girlfriend to tell her about this (”‘Cos she’ll be fine about it lads, she’ll think it’s funny - honestly….”). Girlfriend meanwhile getting hassle from her extended family for not seeing anyone Iranian and/or loaded, and for some reason didn’t appreciate receiving said phone call from someone she’s just spent the last 3 hours defending. Went to bed, woke up after a mere 4 hours sleep with a screaming hangover to an equally screaming bird on phone telling me I’ve ruined xmas. Had xmas lunch for breakfast, with mum telling me I’ve ruined xmas.
Hopefully, I can do better this year >:-)
Posted on 2007-12-06 at 00:00:00
After Christchurch, we felt that going straight to another city with miserable weather would be rubbish, so we took a little diversion via Lake Tekapo.
It was a beautiful day and when we came over the hill and saw the lake, we couldn’t believe our eyes. Apparently, when the glaciers came through these parts they churned up the surrounding rock so that when they receded, the lake was left with the sediments of those rocks suspended in the water, and that sediment gives the lake this amazing turquoise-blue colour.
We spent the day meandering around the lake getting sunstroke and I hold that fully responsible for what happened next. Well, I guess entitling this blog post “I proposed!!!!” may slightly remove any element of surprise, but we’re still building up to that.
For aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages I’d been thinking about doing it but it’s a big decision and I have a Y-chromosome, so these things are never as straight forward as one would hope. Marj had been so excited about this trip for so long, that I thought that this would make it perfect for her - and me - to propose at some time whilst we we’re in New Zealand. After I ran this through my head a few times and shocked myself by realising that I was still there and not on my way to book a single one-way flight to Peru, I knew that I was ready to do the deed. Of course, by this time, there was only a couple of weeks to go before the trip.
When I was in Amsterdam with worky folks, we’d gone along to a tour run by Gassan, the diamond polishing people (something which I didn’t mention because Marj may have got ideas and spoiled the surprise). Obviously it was a sales pitch to buy a diamond from them, and it seems to have worked, because I was planning to go back and buy a shiny ring from there.
So, with only a few days left before we set off for New Zealand and work on my back to get stuff finished before I go, not to mention Marj trying to get me to be organised for the first time in my life and pack more than one day before, I find myself in the situation of having very little time to actually sneak over there to buy it. Somehow, I couldn’t think of a good way to phrase “I’m just popping over for a one night, unplanned trip to Amsterdam before I have to spend three weeks alone with you” to Marj, and so I left for lord of the rings country ring-less.
Throughout the trip, I spent every spare second I had with one eye looking out for the nearest Jewellers and in Taupo I got a few hours to myself whilst Marj recovered from jumping out of a plane and it was there that I spotted the ring I wanted. It was exactly what I would have asked Gassan to make for me and was perfect in almost* every way.
Maybe it was my new found confidence or maybe there is a God and he really does hate atheists but I swear to you, the second I bought that ring and left the shop, suddenly I was the most attractive man on the planet. Every girl on the street was seemed to look me up and down like some virtual reality Lynx advert. I dropped into a shop to buy a drink and the girl at the counter was the most flirty person I’d ever met in my life, I couldn’t believe it.
Gentlemen, there is something going on here. It’s a conspiracy. Somehow, THEY KNOW. They’re just toying with us.
Of course, none of this afected me in the slightest. I had just officially made my decision. Before was a decision in principal - this was a decision made. Nothing could stop me now - although they did seem to be trying very, very hard…. ahem, as I was saying, nothing could stop me now. It’s too late for me now - I only write this to pass on the knowledge to my brethren who are still single. For the love of FHM, just PRETEND you’re about to get engaged!!!!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah; I had a ring and I had a plan: Milford Sound, one of the most beautiful places on Earth seemed an appropriate location to propose to the most beautiful girl on Earth. That was a few days away yet, so I had to keep the ring stashed** and my excitement down.
But then came that night at Lake Tekapo. We were still a few days away from Milford and we’d decided to go out star gazing. I knew that I’d see a different set of stars in NZ*** and was looking for an opportunity to see them, and I’d heard that there was an observatory a Tekapo, so we loaded up the car with jumpers, woolly hats and blankets, plus a couple of beers and a bottle of wine, for-no-reason-what-so-ever-honest. Just before I left, I nipped back inside because “I forgot something” and grabbed the ring - just in case.
And I’m glad I did. There we were, sat in the back of the car with the boot opened and the seats down and a few stars came out… Then a few more… Then the night sky lit up with a million-million more stars than I never knew it was possible to see. There was absolutely no light pollution and the sky was bluish rather than black with layers upon layers of stars and galaxies and a whole universe of who knows what each with a different colour like you’ve never seen.
I was gonna save it for Milford Sound, but you couldn’t beat that night.
We get out of the car and stand in the dark, hugging each other under a blanket we’d borrowed from the hostel room (a particularily fetching shade of pink, I might add) and Marj says “Tell me something romantic”.
“Hmmm”, thinks Darren’s brain, “You have no idea… This is it.” My heart starts beating rapidly and I drop the pink blanket and lose the hat as I go down on one knee (Not that it made any difference as it was pitch black anyway!). Later on, Marj told me that a fast beating heart followed by a drop to the floor usually implies cardiac arrest and at this point, she was about to call an ambulance. Fortunately, I was able to get across the big question.
This all happened on the 28th of November, but because Marj wanted to tell everybody herself, she asked that I didn’t blog it until later. Typical, the most important, bloggable event of my life so far has happened and I received a gagging order! She’s changed her mind now though, so I’m free to write :-D
Did I mention that she said yes? Well, she said yes :-) On reflection, its a good job she did: it would’ve totally ruined the second half of the holiday. Not only did she say yes, but she then spent the rest of the night screaming across the lake “Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaay” like a banshee that’s just won the lottery. I think she was pleased.
So there you go, this is the official announcement - we’re engaged.
—
* - Being free would have removed the need for the “almost” here.
** - Interestingly, during this time, I did find myself sneaking away from Marj and removing the ring from its box just so that I could stare at it , stroke it and whisper “My precious”. Strange that. This country must be getting to me.
*** - Although nothing could prepare me for Orion being upside down
"A Very Happy 27th Birthday (NZ)"
Posted on 2007-12-02 at 00:00:00
The art of flashpacking continues to be perfected as we go. Relative luxury can be found for under $70NZ a night (that’s currently about £27), if you look hard enough. If we were doing this for any longer than three weeks we’d have to slum it, but with things as they are, we’d saved enough to be able to splash out with such extravagance.
I’d like to have written more often, but I can only blog when I get access to the internet and just how am I supposed to find time when I’m having the time of my life? Speaking of which, I’m now writing this from Queenstown. This place is great and after passing through the blights of Christchurch and Dunedin, it even rivals the North Island as a place I’d like to live. This town (you can’t really call it a city) has got everything: The Remarkables, the mountain range that borders it, are beautiful and allow for loads of crazy extreme sports, while lake Wakatipu provides equally crazy water sports. It’s even warm here - at least it has been for us and when its not, there’s always snowboarding in the winter. Yep, I really like the place.
I got a good view of it too - I had my (27th) birthday here yesterday and Marj paid for me to go hang-gliding for my present. It was reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaally cool - even better than skydiving I’d say ‘cos you felt like you were flying rather than falling. Even the way you position your body to do it is reminiscent of the superman pose, although the pictures I got makes it look more like superman with a (super) zimmerframe!
Piahia was the last place we visited in the North Island before returning to Auckland (except for Whangarei Falls on the way back that is) before catching a plane down to the South Island. Everyone we’d spoken to who’d been here had constantly told us how much better the South Island was than the North, but that’s bollocks*. They’re equally amazing if you ask me. The north has a tropical climate while the south is temperate, but they are both very very nice. There’s less folks down here as well, and - maybe I’m obsessing, but - I spotted 4.5 acres near Dunedin going for around about £10,000. That’ll do!
Our timing for Dunedin was a bit crap though: it was St. Andrews day and the place is very very Scottish (Dunedin being celtic for Ednburgh) with the locals even managing to maintain a Scottish accent. Now the Scots are understandably renouned for liking the odd drink and here was a nice excuse for a piss-up so all hell broke lose. If you’ve ever been in Rusholme in Manchester on the Pakistani independence day or on Eid you’ll understand what it was like, but this was worse as they were all pissed too.
Never mind - it sounded like they all had a good night…. those that survived anyway. I had to go to Dunedin as there is a neuroscience group there who do very similar work to us and it would’ve been rude to not pop in and say hello, but if it you’re ever in the South Island and don’t need to go, there are probably better places to spend your time than here. It’s just another big city** really. The same’s true of Christchurch - a big city** with an airport, avoid it unless you have to go there. In between those two places, we popped over to Lake Tekapo - popped being the operative word: explainations will have to wait as this gets its own post and everything (see next blog entry).
After Dunedin, we headed for Queenstown and we’ll use this as a base to go over to Milford Sound tomorrow. Can’t wait, but alas the quicker it comes, the quicker the holiday will be over as that’s our last excursion :-(
I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE YET!!!! Snarf.
—
* - This is coming from the same people who kept telling us that we’d drive for hours without seeing any traffic on the South Island’s roads. This is also bollocks. Its New Zealand, not Mars.
** - By New Zealand standards, of course.
"The Shaving of the Beard Ceremony, 2007"
Posted on 2007-10-23 at 00:00:00
There comes a time in every man’s life when he needs to grow a beard.
There also comes a time, about 4 weeks later, when his girlfriend tells him to shave that stupid bloody face-rug off else she’s leaving him. And so, alas, the beard had to go.
Just remember the good times, beardy. Sniff… I’m sorry, I was very attached to it… (rubbish, Darren).
However, no facial hair removal would be complete without the age-old “shaving of the beard ceremony”. Here are the highlights:
Number 1 - “The Will Riker”
This is our starting point - a full beard. Distinguished. Dashing. Charming. This is the beard of kings, not to mention various goodies from Lord of the Rings. Very nice.
Number 2 - “The Bouncer”
Oh dear. Like this shot wasn’t potentially bad enough without me looking like I badly need the toilet.
The goatee is the face-fluff of choice for bouncers and P.E teachers alike. It couldn’t stay.
Number 3 - “The Metallica”
Now this is more like it:
But why stop there?
Grrrr:
Snarl:
Hang on, in a certain light, it almost looks… oh no - it’s the biker from the village people:
(Yes, that’s right, “It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.Y.” - I think my mum was meant to be doing an “A” there…)
Number 4 - “The Village Person”
All that’s missing for the true village person wannabe is to get rid of the chin-fur, so off it goes:
I think Marj was beginning to get a little bored by this point, but the ceremony cannot be interrupted for it is sacred.
Number 5 - “The Leslie Phillips”
Ding-dong…? Not very convincing. I just look like a twat:
Number 6 - “The Adolf”
We’ve had the Will Riker, the biker, so the obvious next step had to be the third reich-er.
It had to be done. I toyed with the idea of keeping this one, but the dubious manner in which my arm was raised due to the holding of the camera was enough to convince me that I should probably finish the job…. and quickly!
Number 7 - “The Itchy Face”
-
Back to “normal”-
All done, with nothing left of my beard but sweet, sweet memories…
---
Album listening to whilst blogging: 5 new ones on random actually - Linkin Park: Minutes to Midnight, Feist: The Reminder, Foo Fighters: Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, Something Corporate: Leaving Through the Window, and Spitalfield: Better Than Knowing Where You Are (I took last.fm’s word for it and invested in a few new CDs).
Posted on 2007-10-15 at 00:00:00
Before I begin today’s rant, I have something to share with you. Wordpress (the blogging software used to make this site) comes with a handy stats page that tells you all sorts of wonderful stuff, including the search terms which were used to find this site via a search engine. It gives me great pleasure to report that somebody stumbled upon my site using the term “Gay Harrogate Wank”:
I wouldn’t mind, but the bastard still didn’t leave a comment. Even something along the lines of, “Nice site, but I think it needs more men masturbating in tea shops” would have sufficed. Meh.
Oh well, on with the blog post:
Okay, so I spoke with Charles for the first time since my last posting and I’ve left the conversation not really knowing a) what exactly was said, or b) who won. I get the impression that I lost because he kept telling me so, but I have no idea why because I’m fairly certain that he didn’t say anything relevant. He basically answered every question with a “Have you read [place mysterious author name here]? No? Well he says you’re wrong” although at no point did he tell me what any of these people actually said. I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to have a debate with Charles is like trying to gift-wrap a fart – trying to pin him down to anything is pretty much impossible to do, people look at you funny as you attempt it and at the end of the day, no one’s going to thank you.
One of the few things I did manage to ascertain was that he wanted me to go away and read some more, although I’m sure that reading more bit was optional. He did kindly offer to email me a reading list though. Seeing as though at present my own reading list has within it ‘the children’s colour illustrated guide to Socialism’, maybe I need all the help I can get. Actually, its not that bad, but I have bought some “A Very Short Introduction To…” books on Socialism, Capitalism, Democracy, and Marx. I like this style of book - there’s no point in reading some huge tome and still not understanding it. In that case, if you end up in a debate, you have to blag it and say stuff like: “Have you read [place mysterious author name here]? No? Well he says you’re wrong” and then change the subject. I suppose I’d better check out this open-source gun dude’s website afterwards as well. Can’t do any harm to read what the other side’s thinking. So I’ll get back to this subject after I read more then.
Actually, this could well be part of a greater trend. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m actually starting to get interested in all this politics stuff, but that’s not all. Since beginning this blog, there’s been a few people who have actually read it [queue dramatic music and gasps of shock] - Yes, I know, it came as much as a surprise to me as anyone, especially after the total failure of the last incarnation of this site. Still, I suppose even reading this could beat actually doing what you’re supposed to be doing*. Anyway, so there’ve been a few other recommendations as well:
Jacqui keeps telling me about this college that she’s involved with that does all this building a better society stuff tied in with it. I’ve been writing about this kind of thing (well, actually I haven’t, but I keep meaning to finish it). This place is called the Schumacher college and it sounds promising. Well, actually, it sounds like a cult by the way she talks about it, but if its got her so worked up, it must be worth looking into. I promised her that I’d do just that, but that was ages ago now, so I guess I’d better get around to it. While I’m at it, I need to finish James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia that I borrowed from from her (IBAGS rudely interrupted it and I never got back into it again).
Next up is my brother’s mate Dan, who found me on Facebook. He read my pro-liberalism post and sent me a message saying I should read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (way ahead of you, Dan) and also Essays of a Humanist by Julian Huxley. Once again, it’s on the list, and will be read one of these days.
I was chatting with Tom the other day about direct democracy and the like. He’d somehow landed his book plug in New Scientist and I borrowed it off him (haven’t finished it) and while I was there I took the opportunity to ask him about all this ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ stuff thats being thrown around in articles on the net a lot these days. It got me thinking, but I’ll write separately about all that in another post.
This all draws me to several conclusions. Firstly, I need to read more; secondly, I need to finish books that I borrow from other people, ‘cos it’s rude otherwise, and thirdly that this whole university life is doing me good, but I never realised until I started keeping this blog. So, there’ll be no complaining from me that I’ve got nothing to read for a while.
All in all, I think this blogging this is starting to broaden my mind. Yey! (or should I say “hurrah!”? Second thoughts, I think I’ll stick to yey”)
---
* - I’m talking to you - yes, you. Stop reading this and get back to work. Slacker.
"Rookie mistake #17: Total failure to avoid religion and politics on a night out"
Posted on 2007-10-09 at 00:00:00
Last weekend I was in Edinburgh for Mark’s stag do (Just in case any Americans stuble upon this site, that’s pronounced “Edd-inn-bur-huh”. What? Someone needs to let ‘em know they’ve spelled Pittsburgh wrong).
Now Mark is officially classed amongst the brightest people I’ve ever met, as were many of the esteemed invitees to this stag do and then, of course, there was me (there must have been a spare place). Now I have to admit, before I started working at Sheffield, I considered myself to be a smart lad (If you want to go by IQ, my current best is 138), but when these guys get together in conversation, I suddenly feel like the thicky. I wouldn’t mind but they can all pass as normal. Not a nerd in sight. This is a good thing really - it shows there’s hope for humanity yet.
So what happens when you get that many PhDs in a room together? Do they talk about art? Philosphy? The latest developments in nanotechnology? The current socio-political climate in Burma?
Nope.
They all got pissed* and talked about tits.
There was, however, a point that totally let the side down and betrayed our true geek colours. Mid-way through the first night and the sixth pint, Charles (who point blank refuses to be called Charlie) mentioned that he happened to be a libertarian. Now this doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that is usually mentioned in everyday conversation (or maybe it was?), but for the life of me I can’t remember how it came up. First of all I thought it was strange that he was moon-lighting as a bookshelf-stacker until the concept was explained to me**. We were curious, we asked a few questions.
DISCLAIMER: As this will be linked into Facebook, it is possible that Charles will read it. I hope he does, but I just want to state that I write the following intending no offence to him, what so ever. It’s typically the case that when a sentence starts with “With all due respect”, it’s not going to be particularily respectful and in the same vein, by writing, “No offence but…” everyone can tell that this isn’t going to be a love letter. I like the guy and don’t want to offend him, but he did raise some points of view which are polar opposite to what I believe and I’d like to discuss it. In fact, I haven’t met anyone with such a fundamentally opposing view point since I tried to use logic and reasoned argument to sleep with a girl called Zoe in my lab practical at uni (Logically speaking, sleeping with me was the only sensible outcome, but she refused to on the grounds that she didn’t fancy me - oh, and possibly also because I was trying to use logic and reasoned argument to sleep with her. Girls don’t like that apparently.). Anyway, I think I made it perfectly clear that I disagreed with him over the weekend and I’m sure that he won’t mind me putting those thoughts down in print. My point is that if any offence is taken by any of the following then that’s due to my failure as a writer and doesn’t represent any malice towards the guy. In fact, I’ll show this blog entry to him before I post it and give him a chance to respond to defend his position and I’ll remove anything he doesn’t like. Can’t say fairer than that.
Right, now that I’ve said that:
Fucking hell, that man talks some shit!
I don’t know if he’s been watching far too many John Wayne films, but he seemed to think that we would all be safer if we carried around a gun all day. He even used the phrase “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (This has always struck me as the most compelling reason NOT to arm them). No Charles, people holding guns kill people, whereas people not holding guns merely give them a black eye. By carrying a gun, you are raising the stakes, and if he thinks this will protect him from criminals then think about this: your average person without the element of surprise on their side would be more reluctant to use a gun than a heroin-addicted mugger who wants your ipod so he can trade it in for his next fix and doesn’t care how he gets it. I’m jumpy enough about the police waving them around as it is without worrying about gun-toting mentalists roaming the streets. Besides, I have a history of being somewhat accident-prone and knowing me I’ll end up assassinating some old lady while trying to answer my phone.
See? Anyway, he didn’t.
It wasn’t just the gun thing, there was loads more, but the beers kept on flowing and it has been over a week now***, so forgive me if my memory is a little hazy. It probably involved giving corporations total freedom to exploit at will and abolishing the government and all laws except when someone commits a murder (with a gun, no doubt) and all sorts of crap like that. His line of argument seemed to be one of the means being completely justified by the end and self-preservation at the expense of everyone else, which seems to be the very opposite goals to that of society as a whole. Society, and here I refer to society as the meme and as the genes for perpetuating society, has evolved because we are stronger as a group. From a purely evolutionary stand-point, if acting alone conferred an advantage over group-living, then group-living would not have been selected for and we would be solitary animals. As it is, we are a social species (a ‘party animal’ if you will) and (most of) our brains are wired for altruism. This suggests that “united we stand, divided we fall” is as true as it ever was.
Libertarisnism - pah! Even the name is a farce. It implies liberty, but it’s only liberty for those whose great-grandparents could afford it. It just sounds to me like an excuse for the rich getting richer (I think he thinks that the poor don’t try hard enough) while corruption and poverty become rife.
So, where the hell is he coming from? To be honest with you, and fair to Charles, I think that I’ve not fully grasped the concept, because Charles is a very intellegent person and has obviously thought about this a lot, so I’m hoping that he knows something I don’t here. Because if that’s not the case, be afraid, for this anarchist is not alone: I just did a quick google search for libertarianism and I stumbled upon this book called Libertarianism In One Lesson” by some bloke called David Bergland. This is just the first one I found, but seeing as though it was at the top of Google, it seems a fair place to start. Here are a few brief snippets from the synopsis that I hope fairly reveals this mode of thought:
"Find out why Big Macs and hip hop music may be America’s most powerful weapons against foreign dictators. Why we don’t need to worry about aggressors seizing Middle Eastern oil".
(”Seizing” ? Isn’t it theirs already? I thought the Americans were only meant to be customers)
"Get convincing proof that public schools are what poor parents settle for — not what they would freely choose".
"Find out why government welfare programs perpetuate poverty… (Did you know: America’s poor have a higher standard of living than the average middle-class American family had in the 1970s?)".
"Find out how guns make you safer — even if you don’t own one".
Whether this is the de facto libertarian mentality or just one American nutcase, I don’t know, but it is very reminiscent of the crap Charles was gibbering on about. Anyway, he and Jon were arguing about it for hours and Charles, who was no match for Jon in the debating arena and got mercilessly ripped to shreds (although this was from my terribly biased perspective), and yet still he dearly holds on to his beliefs. I’m not sure whether I respect that or not. I think not.
By the end of the night, it seemed to be getting nasty, and I did feel sorry for him. I was temped to tell Jon to leave him alone and it’s not his fault that Oxford and Cambridge has warped his poor suggestable mind, but then I remembered that if he got his way and we lived in his dog-eat-dog ultra-libertarian/utilitarian world, he’d shoot us on sight without batting an eye-lid, just so he could use the flesh on our bones to feed himself, whilst simultaneously helping the environment by easing overpopulation, so I didn’t really have much sympathy.
Actually, some of this stems from disappointment I guess. Charles was part of the ABRG computer revolution where a huge crowd (three) of us switched from using windows to using linux. I took this to imply that he understood the power of the people and the benefits of working together in a society, etc etc, but he’s actually an uber capitalist. I’m not sure what that makes me.
Strangely, I find myself becoming more and more interested by politics these days. Previously I had always avoided it because everywhere I looked I saw corruption. Not the big corruption like you get in poorer contries, but small scale corruption where elected officials don’t act independently but fall in line with a party, which only cares about getting re-elected. These lies and diappointments prevent real progress from happening and so it had always been the reason why I felt so disconnected by it. I think we all know I’m not alone with this one though.
Since taking up programming, however, I find myself drawn to politics for the very same reasons, only this time it’s to do something about it. I now believe that by learning from the open-source model, we can use the internet as the base of a true democracy where the people are fully represented, because it is they themselves that will be making the decisions. I knew that there was definitely a better way of doing things, but was still lost for a definition. I initially started to think that I might be a closet communist, but after a little research, I find that I’m definitely not that because I’m totally against the whole being ruled by a single party thing. I want freedom and democracy too. In fact, I want more than democracy. Communism was a bit of a half-arsed effort, but I reckoned I was definitely still over in the lefty, socialist camp. So I took this mini political quiz and here are the results:
Economic Left/Right: -7.50, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.56.
This plonks me squarely in the box with Gandhi, Nelson Mandella and The Dalai Lama. I can live with that.
According to this very simple measure, I’m liberal but not libertarian. Okay, great, but I already knew that. So what’s the difference between these two concepts? To me, it’s as if being liberal means that you believe that by embracing society you can build a better world where everyone is happy, but if you continue down that path to the extreme of the scale and become a libertarian, then you just kinda give up on society and want everyone to leave you alone else you’ll shoot them for being on your land.
Right, so I’m a liberal, but there’s more to it than that and of the little research I’ve done so far, I think I might have even found it. What I am seems to be included within, but not limited to, “open-source governance/democracy“, “e-democracy“, “direct democracy", “consensus-based decision-making” and “radical transparency“. Check ‘em out on wikipedia. The way I see it is by using the internet - a new tool that will prove to be as, if not more, liberating than the printing press - we might be able to fix the system. I have begun to feel less disillusioned as a problem with a solution (that is currently being ignored) is a lot more interesting to me. Fortunately, it looks like I don’t have to start from scratch then. Phew. I keep coming across someone else with a similar viewpoint as well, called Mitch Kapor (the guy who founded the software company, Lotus). Here (and here) are some of his thoughts which seem far more succinct than my own.
I think we can all safely assume that this won’t be the last you hear from me on this. I’ll get back to you after I look into it some more… unless Charles shoots me first, that is…
All comments gratefully received
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* - Included in this number was a smashing lad who was a lecturer of the psychology of why the British public binge drink. So as you may or may not know, I’ve been blogging along similar lines. Despite this, we all got hammered. Such is life.
** - Okay, so that’s not entirely true, I knew what one is because my mate Pete also claims to be one, but this is the first time I’ve got into it in-depth. Hang on, he went to an elitist uni as well (London School of Economics) - I’m beginning to suspect a southern plot to head-fuck students into peddling this shite.
** - I know, I’m a naughty blogger, but this site is turning into a collection of time-stamped essays rather than daily posts, so somethings gotta give…
Posted on 2007-09-26 at 00:00:00
I’ve thrown caution to the wind, abandoned all previous worries about privacy and have linked in this blog to Facebook using a plug-in and associated Facebook application called Wordbook. Not sure if it’ll work yet, so this is the test post
"Tree-hugging, bleeding heart liberal goody-goodies"
Posted on 2007-09-25 at 00:00:00
Following on from the other week’s rant about parasitical scumbags, I thought I’d add my two-pence worth on the current events in the news (well maybe not current: I started writing this during the spate of shootings, stabbings and beatings to the point of death that was plaguing the country - or at least the media - last month, but as that coincided with my poster preparation for IBAGS, it was left half-finished until now. This has kinda buggered up the chronological order, but never mind.)
Independently, three or four people have been killed (and more since I started writing this post) by local thugs after the victim had been brave enough to say something to them. The one that inspired this posting was a guy who had hired a digger and the local chavs started smashing it in while pissed. He came out to say something to them and they killed him. Whether they meant to kill him or not I don’t know, but they beat him up so badly that he got dead-ed.
Another pointless waste of life was a bloke who got a chocolate bar wrapper thrown into his sisters car window while they were sat in it. He got out and said something or other and got knocked down and his head smashed in. He died. After this, a kid got shot in inner city London and the perpetrators were black, but don’t forget the recent spate of shootings and stabbings of black kids recently. It’s not because they’re black, its because they’re poor and feel powerless. The same is true for any of these kids-turned-murderers: It’s because they’re poorly educated. It’s because they’re given fuck all else to do except stand on a street corner and cause trouble (although I admit, it’s a big leap from being bored to killing someone). It’s because they feel isolated and the only way they can feel a part of something is joining a criminal gang. It’s these kinds of reasons and it’s our fault. I saw this former detective bloke on the BBC the other day (who definitely didn’t come across as a liberal) who said that these kids have “no stake in society” and it made sense.
Anecdote time: When I first came to Sheffield, I was walking down the main street on a busy Saturday morning and I saw a group of black kids push over a Korean looking bloke, who was in his forties. This made me angry. Grrrrr. However, unlike the incredible hulk, I don’t go green and have super-strength when I’m angry, alas, I retain my stick-insect like physique and intimidate no one. I shouted “Oi!” or something equally as eloquent and they turned on me.
Now here’s what would happen in the movies. Our hero would shout “Oi” in much the same way, to which they’d reply “Ged oudda ma way. Dis is between me and da Korean* “. The hero would say “To get to him you’ll have to go through me”, then a guy who looks like a builder who was standing in the crowd and overheard would say “And me” (Probably in a New York accent for some reason). This would be followed by a series of “And me!”s, Sparticus style, until finally an old lady would wave her umbrella and say “And me, deary” or something. The chav-thugs would run off, possibly with the ring-leader (who might well be wearing an eye-patch?) shouting over his shoulder, “I’ll get you next time, stranger, next time!”
As you can expect, that didn’t happen. Instead the Korean bloke subtley took the opportunity to fuck off and in this busy street no one stood by me. I was left defending the principal alone. The ringleader chav fired off a high speed torrent of what I can only assume was abuse, because I couldn’t actually understand a word he was saying. I think I got the idea because the last bit I got and it was “D’you wanna make something of it?!”** Now, to be honest, I really wasn’t expecting any of that at all. I wasn’t even expecting the movie plotline thing. I actually thought they’d snap out of mob mentality and individually acknowledge that things had got out of hand and they’d realise that what they’d done was wrong and go away sheepishly. ‘Cos that’s what I could imagine I’d do if ever in that situation. On reflection, I’m not sure where I’d get that idea from. Maybe I’m more middle-class than I like to admit?
I may be a white English guy with no concept of reality outside of cheesey Hollywood action movies, but still I couldn’t believe that after all the crap that black people have been through in this country and others like America and South Africa, that this little bastard was actually inflicting the same racist shit on other people that so many people in this country have fought so hard to (at least try to) prevent it from happening to him. Was he trying to give ammunition to the Klu Klux Klan and the Daily Mail readers (often the same people in my opinion. Sorry mum! :-) ) by contributing further to the stereotype? To be honest with you, I doubt he even thought about it, and that is simply down to a lack of education.
Here’s an example of a similar situation, but that doesn’t involve race: I used to work in a bar in Manchester, and the bar in question was quite close to the Manchester’s gay village, Canal Street*** and so a disproportionate number of the staff and a few of the regulars were gay, allowing me to hear some… interesting stories (although, this isn’t one of those stories). In this particular case, one of them told me about how a straight couple went into a gay bar (where the guy telling me happened to work) and had a bit of a snog in the corner where they were sat. Of the very few people in the bar at that time of day, one of them called the manager over and told him that he thought it was disgusting that they were allowed to do that in this bar, but he wasn’t allowed to do it in other bars and demanded that they be thrown out. The manager apparently didn’t want to lose the custom of the regular and so went over to them and apologised for having to do it, but told them that they were upsetting the other customers and asked them to stop. Bearing in mind that this story was told to me by someone who was there and that they weren’t doing anything over the top, they just kissed, they left the bar in protest and who could blame them? Now clearly the root of the problem was the original way in which the idiot who complained was treated, but the moment that he applied the same treatment to others was the same moment that he lost any right to claim the moral high ground and act as if he was the victim. This just goes to show that biogtry and ignorance only further spreads biogtry and ignorance.
So it’s not a race thing. Surely everyone wants the same thing, don’t they? The best for themselves and their kids; freedom from oppression; clean drinking water; food on the table; bit of spare cash to buy holidays and other luxuries; stuff like that. I know that there are psychopaths in the world (not all of them violent) who really don’t care about other people, but I’m fairly certain that they’re in the minority. Statistically speaking, the Korean-attack kid wasn’t a psycho, so he probably only did it because he didn’t think about the big picture, he was just thinking about making himself appear more powerful in front of his mates, and he chose to inflict suffering on another human being simply because it was a quick and easy way of getting this. There’s an age-old saying that I’m sure pre-dates the bible (although this doesn’t stop it from making outlandish claims to be the source of all morals) and it is the basis of altruism: treat others as you wish to be treated. In other words, if you want to live in a society that is tolerant of you, then you have to be tolerant of others, and also be prepared to remain tolerant, even when others around you aren’t. I reckon that he just didn’t think, or didn’t want to think, about how this would make the other guy feel.
Yes, I know how it sounds. It makes me come across as as a “bleeding heart liberal” and all that, but bollocks to that, it’s true. It’s a poverty thing. I may be liberal, but the liberal way isn’t to excuse them and let them get away with it next time. In my opinion, the liberal view isn’t about giving them a holiday to make them feel loved (or whatever that crap was about in the news a few years ago). It’s actually about trying to deal with the cause of this mentality, rather than treating the symptoms. The right wing view seems to be “lock ‘em up forever” but this approach is unsustainable. Besides, our prisons are full at the minute.
That leads me nicely on to ask an open question about the point of the criminal justice system. Simply put: What is the point of ‘justice’?This is not as silly a question as you might first think because most people to whom I ask this question respond as if to say it is to punish the people who have done wrong. But it’s not. It is to deter them from doing it again and to set an example to others that if you do wrong, this could happen to you too.
It sometimes works, but usually doesn’t. Maybe it would work better if our police force was 100% effective, but that doesn’t sound entirely plausible (although it does sound a bit scary for some reason), besides if people are desperate and no one will help them, then they will need to commit crime to feed their family, for example, or buy a new Addidas tracksuit. If you don’t deal with the root causes of the crime, then how are you going to stop new people turning into criminals, and if you don’t deal with the root causes of the crime, how are you going to stop the criminal who was locked up from reoffending?
I previously implied that these people are parasites preying upon society, and that provides a nice analogy now as you can view crime to be like a disease. The original method of treating this disease was to kill or exile the criminals. I recall a statistic or two about how the death penalty in Texas is a no more effective deterrent than in other countries where they’re locked up (I can’t provide a reference for this, but you’re all capable of using Google yourselves, so go find one). Anyway, people have got this nasty habit of being wrong quite a bit and death seems so…. irreversible. We don’t like the death penalty, so what about exile? Previously we could send ‘em off to the colonies, but there isn’t any unclaimed land to do this any more. Further investment in moon bases may be required.
When I was in college I wrote a story about how all of the clever, nice people who naturally have the best genetics were collected and put onto a space-ship and taken to another planet to start again (kind of like ‘Left Behind’ but without all that god-bothering nonsense). A friend of mine, Dave Bullock (who is now I believe the UK’s only living conservative voting, pagan policeman) pointed out that this approach was reminiscent of nazi eugenics. I protested saying that nobody was being gassed these people would come because they wanted to and I was trying to help people and…. etc etc etc.
Now would be a good time to remind the readers that I don’t think that that’s the answer any more. Partly because I know a lot more about people, a little more about physics, a fair bit more about evolution and genetics, and partly because I’ve read about the Golgafrincham.
If scumbags are hard-wired that way and can’t help it, and let’s say that they are for a second, I still no longer believe that even if you just took the best bits of society – say my mates and a few leading intellectuals, athletes and the makers of Lost - then this won’t eliminate the bad bits. Even if it did, what else would we be losing? And what about biodiversity? If scumbags are genetically preprogrammed to be scumbags, that might be because being a parasite was a useful trait to have before we organised ourselves into a society (maybe it still is?). Evolution left them in for a reason and we shouldn’t monkey around with that until we understand what that reason was. Maybe they’re here in case society collapses and we need hardy individuals to reseed it?
But that’s all bollocks anyway. I think people are a product of their environment and their opportunities as much as their genetics. I see it like this: You’re born with all these potential tools for dealing with the world which come with your genetics, but you only pick the best tools for the job. In my case, I was born into a happy life with a nice home and loving parents and the best tools were altruism and other posh words for being nice like that. In your typical scumbag’s case, they might’ve been born into a shit life with no family except an alcoholic mum with a tendency to use a broom handle to make her point and the only people who offer anything are the local gang of dealers and carjackers. Now which tools would you pick if you had to live like that? How far does altruism get you when your best mates having the living shit kicked out of him by some older kids and only you can help him. No one else will, because you know that the rest of society doesn’t give a damn? If this is the case, then they’d have no stake in their society: why should they? What’s society ever done for them?
So there’s your answer. We need to give a damn. If we all we’re given the best opportunities, we’d all grow up to be good and there’d be no need to be scumbags. If they still go bad, then you can lock ‘em up.
But it’s too late, when our ancestors began society, they didn’t know what we are just beginning to realise now. How could they? Now we have these people shooting, stabbing and beating each other and good folks like you and I. So what can we do? We try to apply justice. So what is the point of justice? If it’s a punishment, that’s like trying to cure the disease (with fairly ineffective medicine), but isn’t the general consensus that prevention is better than cure?
The point is, if we want to fix society, we have to treat the cause. We have to make a world where crime is more difficult than not committing crime. We have to help people who are at risk of falling into this trap and that, I guess, is what liberalism is all about.
Ta-da!
* - Or replace ‘Korean’ with appropriate ethnic slur.
** - As you can expect, nothing was made of it in the end. Couldda bin worse…
*** - The funniest piece of vandalism I’ve ever seen is when they knocked off the ‘C’ and the ‘S’ of the street name sign, changing ‘Canal Street’ to the vastly more appropriate ‘anal treet’. Of course, they’d been doing it for years and everyone in Manchester’s bored of the joke now and their spelling is appalling, but I still think its genius.
"The simultaneously best and worst joke in the world"
Posted on 2007-09-24 at 00:00:00
I’m in a silly mood today. It’s probably something to do with having to get up at 5.30am this morning.
To celebrate working out how to upload videos, I thought I’d upload an old clip Mitch took with his camera-phone aaaaages ago. I had to ask him where abouts on the server he’d put it though. In his reply, for reasons I won’t go into, he’d mentioned that one of his ambitions was to “thwart an evildoer”
“Okay then.” I sent him back, ” I can hewp you. Weawange theth nemethetheth of everyoneth favourite thuper hewoes into a thenthible order:
* Lex Luther,
* Skelator,
* Joker, The,
Then they’ll be thwarted.”
I don’t think he got it.
Never mind - here’s a much better/worse joke: IT’S THE TWO TURTLES JOKE!!!!!!!
Why did I just put that on YouTube?
UPDATE: Oh dear, that was embarrassing. I forgot to uncheck the ‘public by default’ option and it earned me the notable comments of “You suck” and “Are you trying to talk like Kermit the frog on purpose?”. I don’t think the world’s ready for the 2 turtles joke just yet.
MORE RECENT UPDATE: Oh no! If I uncheck ‘public’ then you can’t get to the video. Dilemma. Do I get rid of the crap 2 turtles joke? No, that would be like a death in the family. It has to stay. The humiliation. Ah well, never mind.
(When they say I sound like Kermit the frog, I wonder if they mean normally, or when I’m doing the first turtle???)
"Autonomouse (What’s in a name)"
Posted on 2007-09-23 at 00:00:01
This site finds itself being called www.autonomouse.com and as I’ve described in my firstest ever post (in the site’s current incarnation anyway), it wasn’t always just a blog. I’d actually opted for the name prior to that when I was thinking of a username for this story website I’d joined. It was called writewords but I eventually decided to remove all my stuff from there in a fit of paranoia (one day I will be an author….. if I ever get around to it). But there was more than this, as a kid I’d played around with CB radios a bit and everyone on there had a ‘handle’. It was basically what chat forums are now (there was probably a lot of wankers on there (literally) after midnight then I guess, but I never encountered them. That would have damaged my then fragile child mind). Finally, like all good geeks I watched the matrix far too many times and decided that I needed a web-based alterego. This is what led me to sit down with a thesaurus and look up a word to describe independent nature (whether or not I want to be!). I found autonomous. I banged an e on the end an lo and behold, instant name.
In uni I came up with the genius idea of starting up my own web design company. By this time, I’d already got the web address and so I thought I could be “Autonomouse: Independent mouse for hire!”
As it happens, I didn’t even have the patience to build my own web site (let alone anyone else’s*) without falling back on open-source content management systems, so I went to do a PhD instead (I know I’m a quitter).
So why am I wittering on about this? Well, Marj has just seen an advert for an exhibition at the Whitworth art gallery on her way to work and guess what it’s called? Autonomouse. Snarf. And here was me thinking I was being original. Potential spin off might be that I get increased numbers of people stumbling onto my web site, but I’m not sure if that matters - I’m writing this just for me really. Actually, seeing as though we’re on the subject, whilst googling, I’ve come across other places where they’ve used autonomouse too and they all have a tenuous link to me, which is weird.
First of all, there’s this ALECSYS project where they’ve designed a robotic gizmo that does something robotty based on a mouse (probably) and they’ve called it the autonomouse (Genius!), which is fair enough. Our group does a fair bit of animat type stuff and I currently share an office with a lass who’s working on robotic rat whisking, but their name isn’t as clever, so that’s tenuous link #1.
Next up, there’s this and this, which I can only assume is the same person. The tenuous link here is that they’ve ended up using wordpress (although luckily, I got in there first with the dot com site) AND they’ve set up designing web pages. Looks like I’ve got me a nemesis! Thinking about it, I’d better be nice because once you link things to a wordpress site, it sometimes has a trackback thingmyjig that appears as a comment at the bottom of the page (Hello autonomouse2 you big imposter you**). Okay okay, I admit it, the name’s good - even if I do say so myself - but its a big internet and it’s somewhat unrealistic to expect nobody else to come up with putting an extra letter onto an existing word, but I was just getting used to having it as my pseudonym. Maybe I need to do something so big that the name is forever immortalised and no one will ever copy it. I’m not much of a hacker though and cyber crime just makes me laugh (heh, cyber, heh). Maybe I could be a superhero or something?
Finally, there is also a webpage showing some graffiti/street art… okay, graffiti, saying “Autonomouses” and that was tenuous link #3, because…er… I’ve seen some graffiti before…
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* - That’s not entirely true - I did this for Steve at work, but it goes through occasional bouts of ‘off-line due to lack of paying the bills-ness’
** - From the look of it, the site has long been abandoned. Shame, I could have had that one too and linked in the feed from this blog somehow. Ah well.
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Listening to whilst blogging:
A song called "1 2 3 4" by Feist mainly (its on the telly a lot at the minute for the new ipod commercials - it’s called and it’s a bit good):
"Holland: Free bars and Englishmen (Catch-up post)"
Posted on 2007-09-23 at 00:00:00
This is one of the postings I’d started to think about and write down a few notes for, but didn’t get around to posting it. So it’s not really in chronological order. Soz. So, the last time anyone heard from me was when I was mid-IBAGS. I managed to type that one briefly before leaving to go souvenir shopping for the missus. Its weird; I thought that I would have loads of spare time and be generally bored whilst out there, so I took my laptop along and had grand plans that I was going to update this blog while out there, but as it turned out I spent most of the conference in the pub.
The ABRG is somewhat renowned for enjoying a drink or two and this had always previously been a good thing: it was nice to be part of such a friendly, social research group (especially compared to some of the other groups in the psychology department), however, events at this conference have started to make me slightly paranoid.
One of the first nights we were there, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that the first drink was free with the complementary barbecue. Once that drink was done with, one of us went to the bar to buy the first round, and found out that this, too, was free. This was an international conference and so there were a lot of folks there, so we assumed that they’d lost track of how many drinks they’d distributed already.
At this point, a kind of mania took us over - you know, the sort that you only get when you realise that you’ve managed to get something for nothing. The decision was made, we’d go through every type of beer available until the free beer stopped flowing. But of course, it didn’t stop flowing; what actually happened was that it was a free bar all night and the Europeans took it steady and enjoyed their drink, while we went nuts and enjoyed our drink a little too much. That this stuff was like drinking rocket fuel seemed to be offset by the fact that it came in mere half pint receptacles, which had the unfortunate side effect of making us think we’d had much less that we actually did.
After trying each of the beers on tap, of which there were four, we tried them again. And again.
There tends to be a few moments in your life when you take a look around and a grim realisation takes you over. One of them happened here. Obviously woefully unprepared for the English, the bar that we were in did not have adequate glass collective facilities and I noted that our table was filled with approximately 47,412 empty glasses (give or take). I took the momentary lapse in conversation as an opportunity to have a nose around to see what everyone else was up to, as you do, and to my horror noticed that everybody else’s table seemed to only have one or two glasses on it. And everyone was giving us that cold piercing stare that can only be used to full effect by the sober. We were no longer a table of notable Professors, Doctors and PhD students, we had turned into a mob of English drunks. I could tell that they expected us to burst into football hooliganism at any point. So I did what any slightly self-conscious Englishman would do at a moment like this. I got the next round in and drank them all away…..
The previous night when we arrived at the hotel, I had a headache due to a lack of sleep and an excess of panic that came with the last-minute poster preparation, and so only had the one at the bar and decided to hit the sack early. My colleagues however, being more organised (or in Jon’s case, simply more used to it) stayed out for a few pints in the hotel bar and made friends with Geoff the Dutch barman (that was his name!). They had warmed to him with his tales of Kazakhstanis asking him, Borat-style, where they could get ’sexy time’ and other, less funny stories which I didn’t bother remembering. I’d met him briefly that night, but I really don’t remember him scowling so much. In fact, I’d say that he scowled from the point that we re-entered the hotel bar on the night of the barbecue, pissed as a newt, until the day we left the hotel. On reflection, this probably wasn’t then the best opportunity to try my hand at networking (I spent the rest of the conference feeling slightly sheepish). Jon spoke with him the next day and he said that we were being generally obnoxious. This was probably to be expected, but it still comes as a bit of a shock. You get so used to drinking that you go around trying to be sociable and inclusive and whatnot, and you never consider that you’re actually being an arsehole* - you forget that its a very potent drug.
I’m only concerned because of the stuff I’ve been thinking about recently. Everything we English do has revolve around drinking somehow. It really shouldn’t be like this and I’m getting tired of it. Every time I want to go out and be friendly and try to meet new people, I’ve not only got to keep fucking up my body with this shit, but I’ve now gotta pay £3 a pint for the privilege (which might be why we go so mad for a free bar?). There’s an Oliver Reed quote that says “I drink to make other people interesting”, but if we all honestly tried a bit more to reach out to random strangers, we wouldn’t feel so inhibited and so we wouldn’t need to drink so much to remove those inhibitions when we do go out! I now see what they mean when the government says we need to be more European in our approach to drinking.
The most memorable event in the whole Holland experience was the formal meal on the last night. After the meal, there was an hour of obituaries for two people I’d never heard of but who were quite big fish in the Basal Ganglia pond and this was immediately followed by “Mr. Steel and his Sunshine Band” without a pause. Seriously, it went like this,
“…..and I will *sob* miss them *floods of tears* so so much. And now for some light hearted calipso music!!! Let’s party!”
Bizarre, but highly amusing. Anyway, as soon as the music came on, they were all there dancing, sober as anything and only the English were left on the sidelines, unable to walk within 10 metres of the dance-floor without being tanked up. I bet they save a fortune.
To continue the drug abuse theme, on the last day, we went to Amsterdam:
I’ve been to Amsterdam before and done the stoner thing, so this time, I thought I might attempt to get some culture and check out a museum or two. All was going well until we popped into a coffee shop and asked for 2 teas and a coffee. The waitress told us politely, but in no uncertain terms that we had to buy some cannabis or get out. What a great country! Where else can you be thrown out of the establishment for NOT smoking weed?! You can’t blame them though, I suppose it it kinda like going into a Thai massage parlor and just wanting a massage. Eventually I caved in and got stoned, Ric gave it a miss, while Jon stuck with the space cakes which I think they forgot to add the cannabis. I don’t know if they were supposed to be left on the side and absorb any passing smoke, but weren’t out long enough or what, but they were as weak as anything. Oh well, I had a good time inanely giggling at bus stops by myself.
* - I never worked out if this is meant to be arse-whole, as in the whole of you being an arse, or arse-hole, as in the bit you poo out of. I suspect it started as arse-whole and then it became an Americanism, thus turning into arse-hole because it’s easier to spell and still makes sense…
Posted on 2007-09-19 at 00:00:00
So I got back from the IBAGS conference with every intention of updating this blog, but I had been working so hard and the thought of looking at another computer screen ever again made me feel sick, so I gave myself the weekend off and we went to see my parents. Come Monday, I look at my email again, only to find that I had another mini-conference on Wednesday (not the following Monday as I had thought). Queue another all night graph-making session, followed by three days of listening to other people talk about stuff I know nothing about (My talk was equally baffling for them and, if I might add, quite boring. Even for me. Who’s work it was on. And who wrote and presented it.). I got back on Friday, and the urge to play Command & Conquor 3 was so strong that I didn’t write anything. After completing it, the urge was then to do anything and everything other than what I was meant to be doing and it was so strong that I even tidied the house. I don’t know at what point writing to my blog got lumped in with work, but after focusing on one task for so long, it seems my brain is rebelling and refuses to do anything even remotely work like. I seem to have developed the work ethic of a French union boss.
Today, I have no more excuses not to do any work, and so, after staring at my computer screen for about 6 hours, I finally managed to convince it to let me blog, but only because it’s not work and I’ve run out of non-work things to do (Really, there isn’t a video left on YouTube, a webpage about anything even remotely futuristicy or an article on the BBC website I haven’t seen).
So for the passed (or should that be past?) month (almost), I’ve not blogged* a thing because I’ve been too busy. However, because I’ve been so busy, I’ve been thinking about everything other than what I should be thinking about and so I’ve had loads of stuff I want to blog (”Oh the irony”, etc etc). But that’s okay, I thought in my infinite wisdom, I’ll just compress it all down to post-it note level and come back to my notes later. I’m sure this would have been fine if I had then written it up whilst at one of the hotels I stayed it, but it seems that I was too busy networking. By networking, I obviously mean drinking with work colleagues until stupid o’clock and then unexpectedly standing up merekat style and announcing “Right, time to network”, which, as accounted back to me the following day, meant staggering up to some poor German postdoc who had been momentarily left alone, plonking myself down next to her with a “Hello *hic* I’m networking” and then ignoring her and talking across her to Mark for the rest of the evening, which thankfully for all parties concerned, was brief as it was 4am and the bar was closing.
So, now I’m here at my PC and I can’t remember a bloody thing about what I wanted to write about. Well that’s not true, I remember most of the stuff, and this might explain the sudden influx of out-of-date and no longer topical posts that are sure to follow this one (probably), but there is one note that I wrote during that 30-hour sleep deprivation session where I did most of the cutting edge neuroscience that went into my IBAGS poster (remind me to reanalyse those results). It simply reads:
“Rel. Cage. Food twister. Gk.”
So there you have it. That little gem of wisdom is so clear that I don’t think I even need to write about it any further…..
WHAT DOES REL CAGE FOOD TWISTER GK MEAN ?!?!?!?! It could be the cure for fucking cancer or anything!
Ah well, another potentially meaningful insight lost to the world. I s’pose it’s my fault or putting things off. Honestly though, I don’t know where prolific bloggers get the time to … well, blog prolifically. I had the same problem when I used to write a diary. That and the fact that my mother kept sneaking into my room to read it. I had to burn them in the end, which was a shame, ‘cos now I will never know the exact date when I first grew pubic hair. Tragic. My next attempt at recording my life was making video diaries. I think they call it vlogging or something silly like that now. I don’t think I’ve ever watched one back. I bored myself to tears whilst I was recording them! Writing stuff down is definately the way forward. This way, you get to keep some elements of spontaneity but it still comes out in a nice structured and polished form, and most importantly, doesn’t have me going “erm, um, argh” every five minutes (yes that’s right, I have west country farmer tourettes).
* - Is ‘blog’ a verb. The act of blogging. To blog. I guess so. But hang on, isn’t short for web-log? Well, I suppoe it kinda makes sense**.
** - Wikipedia says it is - hooray! Well, I’ll be able to sleep tonight then. How exciting.
Posted on 2007-09-03 at 00:00:00
Brief synopsis of first day of conference:
Arrived here for 9pm, marveled at huge room, drank, learned Dutch for “Thankyou” (”Danku”), forgot toothpaste, noted significant lack of free toothpaste in room, slept, woke up, ate, bought toothpaste, got bombarded by neuroscience, panicked that I really didn’t know enough neuroscience to be talking to these people, ate, put up poster, found lots of mistakes in poster, sighed, went to lectures, got bombarded by more neuroscience, found internet connected PC, wrote this.
Here ’til Thursday, then I’m off the Amsterdam to destroy any traitorous brain cells that have learned anything.
Posted on 2007-08-25 at 00:00:00
Last night was gay pride in Manchester. I would’ve expected floats for some reason, but it was in fact loud music and lights kept behind lots of fencing. That’s fencing as in walls, not a mass of sword-fighting homosexuals. Just in case you were wondering. It looked fun…. in a gay kinda way.
As it happened, Marjie took me out for a chinese when she picked me up from the station and as we passed through the city centre we noticed a large quantity of hand-holding girls, men in tight white tee-shirts* and trans-sexuals. It still took a while to click - This IS Manchetser we’re talking about here.
The reason Marj took me out was ‘cos I’ve been working like a [PLACE WITTY NAME OF HARD WORKING THING HERE] towards this conference, and I’ve been fairly burned out, so as it happened, I wasn’t up for a night out (I’ve since learned that we couldn’t go anyway as you have to buy tickets a bit like glastonbury. So they’re only proud of their well paid gays then?), but I said to Marj that it would be a laugh and under other circumstances and we should’ve gone. She said she’d been once or twice before and it was a hassle free night, so long as you could cope with the crazy shit going on around you (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea).
This promted the question, “Do you have any inklings towards that kind of thing”.
“No”, says I, “Unfortunately”
“Huh?” came the reply. So let me explain.
I’m not gay and don’t want to be gay. (I’m not sure why I started this sentence with a disclaimer like that, but maybe I’m just too English for my own good sometimes. Here comes the “but”…) but I’ve always thought that bisexuals get the best deal. You can go straight for girls or you can go gay for men, you could even have both at the same time. Brilliant. When I think back to my single days, the amount of nights that I was lonely and/or bored and was out on the pull so that I could spend some time getting to know a complete stranger and nine times out of ten, I’d come back alone. Now I’m not a bad looking guy, but those are pretty crap statistics, especially when you consider that I’m quite picky about the girls I go for in the first place. If I was bi, there’d be twice the potential to go home with someone.
Actually, hang on. By following this line of reasoning, it would in fact be better just to have no standards at all and go for anyone… but then I wouldn’t end up with the most perfect girl in the world as my girlfriend (aww). Hmmm, maybe I did good just the way I was.
Whatever, my point is that I’ve always been fairly liberal, and if I was gay, I’m the the kind of person who’d tell everybody! And that’s how the world should be. It’s a shame that so many people have to hide their true desires. I guess I should feel fortunate that I’ve never had to. The worst ones though, in my opinion, are those who are gay but pretend that they’re not. I heard about this very influential, but mad as a badger American christian bloke who was preaching all this anti-homo bollocks and then he was caught with his pants down in a park with another guy. Not being one to be easily knocked down, I think the story goes that he said the devil was trying to corrupt him and he disappeared to some christian place for a couple of days and once he’d reemerged, he declared himself “cured”. What a shithead.
People like that go around preaching that “It’s not natural” and “the bible says that it is wrong” and so it should be banned. Religion should be banned if you ask me - that’s doing far more harm by the look of things. The thing that these nutjobs fail to see is that by their reckoning, love is unnatural too:
From an evolutionary perspective, if its so prevalent in todays society and such a relatively high percentage of the population is gay (about the same proportion as the left-handers** I think), then it must have conveyed a selective advantage to humanity in the past. We don’t know what it is at the moment, but just because it doesn’t directly lead to more babies doesn’t mean to say it should immediately be proclaimed to be “unnatural”. It may just be a biproduct (no pun intended) of something that is beneficial to our evolution, but don’t let this fact devalue it. By the same logic, you could just as easily say that love is a biproduct of looking after the next generation, but now love has become something to live for in it’s own right. It has become greater than its intended function and just because we know that it’s not a divine gift from above, and instead is an evolutionary manipulation, doesn’t stop us from enjoying the experience.
I may be mixing stories up here, but I think this is the guy who’s considering running for US president. If that happens, the world is more fucked that is was the day they elected Bush in. I’ve always believed that if you’re not honest with yourself, then it’s going to bubble up to the surface in some other way. For this git, it probably emerges as a self-loathing and a loathing for anyone else who feels the same way. You can’t suppress a squillion years of evolution, you can’t suppress your natural desires without something untoward happening. You need to be open and honest with yourself. If this guy can’t do that, what’s he gonna be like when his fingers resting on that big red nuclear button (Another crusade anyone? I fucking hate religion.)
No, it’s things like this that convince me that the more honest and open you are, the more you’ll enjoy life.
-------------------------------------------
* - Someone once told me that the reason gay men were tight white tee-shirts is that when two men live together, neither knows how to operate the washing machine correctly, so they only buy white things, but then they shrink them. Plausible…
** - Didn’t we try to burn a few of those in a witch hunt too?
"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when we first blog"
Posted on 2007-08-23 at 00:00:00
For the past few weeks, I’ve been posting this blog to Facebook using their handy import function, and all has been fine. I made a reference or two in an earlier post to the potential privacy issues that might arise, but I had decided that it was worth it, in order to make some progress towards leading that free and open life I keep alluding to. I’m not sure how many people are reading this. I would hazard a guess at one, including myself, but that’s okay because I’m using this like a public diary, so I can look back on it in a few years time and work out why I failed my PhD (Probably because I was writing this rather than doing any work).
The problem with a public diary though, is you can’t have any secrets. Fair enough, I think, I don’t have any…. but actually I do. Quite a biggy in fact.
My girlfriend, Marj, and I have been going out for over two years. We met when I was at uni in Manchester doing my MSc. Because it was in computation, I was worried about appearing on my CV to have lost interest in the biology side to my studies. In order to keep this up while I did my masters, I took a part time job in the pathology labs at the hospital. As it happens, the job entailed sticking bar codes onto test-tubes and had sod all to do with biological sciences, “but as long as it looked good on paper” I thought. I was a little narked that I had a 2:1 from a fine university and had ended up doing this, but at least I wasn’t pulling pints any more and besides, there was this girl there I fancied called Marj…
Anyway, you get the idea. So then I go and decide to do a PhD in Sheffield. Not too far away, but far enough to be a problem, especially if you don’t own a car. We spent all that time only seeing each other once or twice a week. After all the hassle with buying a flat this year, we just thought sod it and I moved in with her.
This is the best thing I’ve done in a very long time. I love living with my girlfriend. I like the town where we live. I like working from home half of the week. We have the occasional dispute over what that little mat that sits around the toilet is for (I say it’s for soaking up wee when you miss, she says its for keeping your feet warm, I say eugh, you’ll get wet feet) and the distance is a problem (it takes about 2 hours one way), but I’ve used it as a nice excuse to buy a shiny new laptop. Overall, life is good. The only real problem is that we can’t tell her parents.
Now, I don’t fully comprehend the reasons behind this decision. In fact, I disagree with it completely, they are good people and I’m very fond of them, but its her choice. The reason we can’t tell them is because apparently Iranian girls who live someone their not married to are viewed as whores. I can’t believe her family will look at her like that - her brother lives with his girlfriend for a start, but maybe its different if you’re a guy? Surely they can’t expect to raise their girl in England and still expect her to share that view with them. This isn’t some weird muslim thing. Her dad’s an atheist for a start, but it’s just part of the culture, so I’m told. I don’t really know what to think so I just do what I’m told and keep my gob shut until we get married. I’m not ever so keen to rush into marriage, even though I’m 100% sure about Marj, just because I think it’ll risk the whole show if we apply too much pressure at the wrong time. Besides, I’m a poor student at the minute and can’t provide for her the way I want to, so I’ll wait until after my PhD is finished.
Now, her brother’s girlfriend has signed up to be my friend on Facebook, which is nice. But this is the problem. If she knows, then he’ll know, then they’ll know and we’re not ready for that just yet. To cut a long story only slightly less long, I’ve removed the export to Facebook :-(
Posted on 2007-08-14 at 00:00:00
Earlier on this year, Marj and I were driving home from her work’s do which ended up in Manchester’s joint best club, 5th Avenue (the other being Satan’s Hollow -where else can you hear Jimmy Eat World, followed by The Mars Volta in the same club, on the same night?). Like a good designated driver, Marj hadn’t touched a drop all night and was driving us back to what was at the time was her place (now being our place :-) ).
Whilst still in the city centre, when she was changing lanes, she must have misjudged it and we came in too close to the car that was in that lane and they bumped into us. Whether or not they were going too fast I don’t know, but we were probably doing about 20-odd mph.
So we think, “Oops” and get out to do the usual swappy insurance details thing, but just our luck, the car we bumped into happened to be a Lexus. It overtook us and stopped (as if we wouldn’t have stopped anyway!) and out come four of the scummiest gangster wannabie knobheads I have ever met in my life. The fat bastard who was driving starts effing and blinding and waving his arms about like an overzealous extra in playing someone drowning in Baywatch and barked orders at his minions to take photos of our car’s number plate with their phones. Not a bad idea, methinks fumbling for my camera phone.
Marj asked if he was alright and Mr ‘get rich or diet trying’ ignored her. Once he was satisfied that the world knew that he was a little bit upset, she asked again and he said he was fine (not asking how she was or anything) and they started talking about insurancey stuff. I take the opportunity to have a look at the damage to our car (which equates to approximately: zero).
Because it was raining heavily, fatty had demanded that Marj get into his car, which I don’t realise ’til its too late of course, otherwise I never would have let her go in there. While fatty’s in the car with Marj, I carry on my little inspection and move on to their car, and memorising the number plate while I’m at it. They don’t like this one bit, probably because there’s fuck all wrong with their car. Once I’d finished, I went under the bus stand where I could keep dry whilst making sure that they’re not going to steal Marj or anything. At this point, I get the delight or sharing my shelter with two of fatty’s cohorts. There was an asian guy with an expression on his face like he accidentally got his suppository mixed up with a cactus, and a white guy who was trying his best to appear black, but the headband and the footballer’s tash (the facial hair was 5-a-side) seemed to give him more of an angry-pirate look.
All in all, it was quite amusing, I thought, so I gave them a little nod hello and offered them a “what can you do, eh?” look. The pirate walks closer, looks up to me like a terrier to a postman and says “Wot you smilin’ at?!”
I give it a couple of seconds, opt for the ‘calm-down dear’ approach to insurance claims and say, “I’m just bemused with the situation. The insurance’ll cover it, don’t worry about it”
Obviously happy that he heard a word he understood, he replied, “It’s not this you should be worried about - it’s me!”
The thing is, boatswain chavboy, if you have to tell me I should be worried, the chances are I shouldn’t need to be. Barely stifling a smirk, I say “Right okay, well thanks for telling me, I am now.”
He seemed quite satisfied with this response, maybe I should have said it slower and in a slightly more condensending manner.
He tries a second time, “You look like a cop”
Look like a cop?
The only reason I didn’t say anything was that I was so torn between shit-stirring further by saying, “Thankyou, I work out” and “Three of my best friends are cops” (true), that I’d had enough time to realise that my girlfriend was currently sat in the lion’s den that was the chavmobile, so instead I bite my tongue. Sometimes, I hate being so grown up. I turn back to check on her and a couple of seconds later she emerges from the car. During this time, I don’t think the pirate took his eyes off me, but he then turns his attention to Marj and says, “There’s summing up with the way he talks” referring to my use of words not commonly found in the books he reads (i.e. those starting with “My first…”).
For the next comment, Marj assures me that she only said it because she thought he meant that he couldn’t understand my mumbly accent, but she’s still in trouble. “It’s alright,” She said, “he’s from Grimsby”
Later on, I got quite angry about what happened, but that remark combined with the pure seriousness that was emanating from the robbin’-in-da-hood and his merry chavs means that I nearly pissed myself laughing at this point. Luckily I didn’t. There’s only so far you can wind stupid people up before they do something silly.
Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t even his car, he told Marj it was someone else’s. I’m guessing it was either his dealer’s or his dad’s. I doubt it was even his name. She also said the car stank of weed. Dunno how you can get so angry while smoking weed, but hey. The worst part was that Marj hadn’t been in an accident before and so handed over the information he asked and then got the same info back, this meant they swapped names, telephone numbers and home addresses. Bad move.
Over the next few weeks he kept phoning her demanding to know why she hadn’t claimed responsibility, getting quite angry with her. She told the insurance company exactly the above and said that we didn’t know who’s fault it was (if he was speeding or if it was all our fault). He said that straight after the accident they went to the police station and got a copy of CCTV footage showing that it was our fault. Yerright, like the police would just hand over CCTV recordings to the public*. Besides, I seriously doubt they’d go within four miles of a police station!
She phoned her insurance and they told him off. I’m not sure what they said to him, but he hasn’t phoned back since. Go Sheila’s Wheels!
The thing I’ve always hated about Manchester is the massive concentration of agro. There are a lot of nice bits in Manchester, there are a lot of nice people in Manchester, but the miserable weather and the years of industrial pollutants must have somehow contaminated the gene pool there to produce this shoulder-swaggering, dog-eat-dog, loutish sub-culture that appears to be represented in every public location. That’s right folks - the ’scumbag’. Manchester’s full of ‘em, so we we’re bound to crash into some at one time or another…
So why am I sharing this tale with you? Well, today, Marj was called by her insurance company to say that they were all claining for whiplash. All four of them! BASTARDS!
It wasn’t a high speed smash that caused us to stop! We only fucking nipped each other!
This, dear readers, is why your insurance premiums are so high.
Confession time: At the end of the first year of uni, I was involved in a crash whilst in a taxi. I was rear facing, and Dave Rae was opposite me. Someone jumped a light and the taxi smashed into it and a few other cars. Dave was thrown forward and cracked into my chest. A couple of days later, when picking up some crates at the student union bar where I worked, the pain was really bad and so I went to hospital. It turned out that I’d fractured my sternum. I regret it to this day, but as I said, I was a very poor student, so I phoned up one of these “where there’s a blame there’s a claim” companies. It took a few months but eventually I got three grand.
I felt really bad for contributing for the American-esque blame culture that exists in this country today, but its quite astounding how quickly your morality collapses in the face of free cash. The point is, I actually had something worthy of compensation. In my thoughts on building a better society, I’ve often mentioned ‘the parasite’ and these are one of the best examples I’ve seen in a long time. I resent these bastards getting money, but it’s our fault. In the process of my claim, the solicitors sent me to a doctor in a private hospital in Leicester. His job, it seemed, was to be paid an extortionate amount of money to write down whatever I told him was wrong with me on official looking paper and send it to the insurance companies. He actually encouraged me to make stuff up and he’d ‘prove’ it for me. I didn’t, but my guess is these bastards won’t have the same restraint.
Marj says I shouldn’t worry about it because its the most money they’ll see in their whole lives, but I still want to call scum-busters or something and stop them from doing this.
* - UPDATE (4 Jun 08): It looks like you can do this after all, but this guy was bluffing anyway.
"Procrastination is not a crime…"
Posted on 2007-08-11 at 00:00:00
For those of you not familiar with the significance of this segment of a PhD, it’s what I like to refer to as “panic time” (Often also colloquially referred to as “Oh fuck” and/or “bollocks! o’clock”). Although the etymology of this phrase is not completely understood, it is generally accepted to be called this because I’VE ONLY GOT THREE WEEKS LEFT BEFORE THE IBAGS* CONFERENCE IN SEPTEMBER AND ITS STILL NOT BLOODY WORKING. I’VE GOT TO PRESENT A POSTER TO PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT AND I CAN’T BULLSHIT THAT AND I STILL HAVEN’T GOT ANYWHERE NEAR WHERE I NEED TO BE AND ITS ALL GONE WRONG AND ITS NOT WORKING AND stuff like that, now where did I leave that ketamine? In essence, I’ve got my own bodyweight in research to do and sod all time to do it in.
Why can’t I just be a forward-planning type person like all the other boys and girls…? Who’d've thought a PhD in neuroscience would be hard anyway? I was kind a hoping that I might be their millionth customer and that they might give me one for free… no such luck. Oh well, I suppose I’d better do some work then :-(
Anyway, don’t expect to hear another peep from me until mid-September… unless I get bored and decide to do something else… which is quite likely…. in fact, forget I said anything.
Meh, as they say.
* - That would be the International BAsal Ganglia Society, don’t cha know…
"Part-time social engineering"
Posted on 2007-08-03 at 00:00:00
Seeing as though I’m still renting my place in Sheffield for a further 2 weeks at least, I stayed over in my old room last night. I found it telling that after a couple of weeks of getting in to work on time (whether it be in the office or at the desk at home) , the instant that I’m in charge of getting myself up in the morning, I oversleep by about 4 hours. No really, I was meant to be helping Iona out by taking part in her experiment and only woke up when I got a phone call asking if I was coming in. That was at like 11 or something.
I blame the late nights myself – I went bouldering after work (first time I’ve been in ages, I’m still rubbish) then spent the rest of the night working on the much derided ‘Hoylandism’. I’m actually trying to save the world here, but Charles still reckons I’m trying to start my own dictatorship (How can a system where everyone has an equal say be a dictatorship? Moron). I need a name for it as well. If I go around calling it Hoylanism, then Charles may well be right. I’ll have to do a bit of research to see if there’s anything similar out there, but in the meanwhile, I was thinking of calling it ‘openism’ or something. I wonder if that means anything rude in another language? ‘Optimism’ might be more appropriate?
Actually, while I was waiting for the bus to come in this mor… well alright, this afternoon, a bloke in a wheelchair rolled up to me and out of the blue, said, “So where’d'you come from then?”. After having a thorough check around me to make sure he wasn’t taking to someone he knew, I replied, “Er… Grimsby…. You?”
“Lincoln” he answered immediately. Then he said, as if talking to someone he knew, “So where’re you off to then”
At this point, I was feeling bemused but slightly uncomfortable, but then I started to appreciate the irony of the situation. I’d spent the night before writing about how we should all be more open and all that, and here was this guy doing just that and I was thinking he was a weirdo. Thinking that this was the ideal opportunity to put my new found open nature to the test, I relaxed a bit and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt on the weirdo front.
“I’m just off to work, how about you?” I enquired happily.
“I’m just off for a walk,” he barked bitterly and shot away in his chair at high velocity.
Some part of my brain registered that something odd had just happened, but the rest of my brain, being a bit too British for it’s own good, wasn’t sure if that was a joke, and so I laughed politely in reflex - like you do when someone you don’t know has just made a crap joke. And then I realised that laughing at someone who was in a wheelchair probably wasn’t a good idea so I tried to salvage the situation by saying, “A walk? Where to?”. Of course, by this time, I was talking to myself…
So as it happens, the guy was a weirdo. But maybe he was a weirdo because he didn’t have anyone to talk to normally. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with talking to strangers, it just so happens that in this country, its only weirdos that do it. I remember something in the news after the last world cup when people started waving their Union Jacks around. Normally, only extreme right wing people had a flag in their window and the government was trying to “take back the flag from the BNP” by encouraging people to be more patriotic. It didn’t work, but the same could be applied in this situation - maybe we could “take back talking to random people at bus stops from the weirdos”?
That’d be nice.
"It’s crazy but it just might work…"
Posted on 2007-08-01 at 00:00:00
While I’m waiting for one of my simulations to run (working from home rocks), I’m just reading Jame’s Lovelock’s “The Revenge of Gaia” that Jacqui lent to me a while ago (sorry Jak, it took me a while to finish the last one!).
I’m only midway through the first chapter, but I can see where the book is going. It’s going to continue to state the problem in a worst case scenario type way and is basically a call to arms for us to do something about our situation. Lovelock says that it is too late for sustainable development and instead we should focus on sustainable retreat, i.e. learn to give up some luxuries else we’ll lose the lot.
He concedes that to give up on technology would be the same as destruction of our civilisation, so there’s no room for any of you who have that romantic, rose-tinted nostalgia for pre-industrial society with all its disease, oppression and general crappiness - especially now that we’ve tasted the power of science and technology and seen the benefits that it can bring us. That would be criminal.
In fact, it’s comparing our continued use of fossil fuels and way we desecrate the planet as a kind of addiction that will kill us (us literally) if we carry on doing it, but will kill us (our civilisation) if we go cold turkey. Clever guy, that Lovelock.
So, instead we need to change our way of life and engage in a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the planet (or Gaia as he puts it - I guess that Gaia includes us too).
As I say, I’ve only started reading it, but having recently finished reading Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion”, it seems that a few problems with our current model of society have become clear to me. Next add to this the problems of poverty, oppression, corruption, …. etc and it seems that its time for us to evolve it into something better. I’m not talking about Britain’s society here, I’m talking about all of the civilisations of the world. We’re all tarred with the same brush as we in Britain cannot enjoy the benefits of our way of life without exploiting other societies. seeing as though we’re all in the same boat (well, planet anyway), what we want is a way of living which has an integral equality for all people who live this way. This is a tall order, but I’ve also spent a lot of time recently using and reading about the philosophy behind the free software/open source movement and I am becoming more and more convinced that it can be applied here somehow.
A few thoughts that have been occupying much of my time are starting to crystallise. What I’m thinking is that we need a new way of thinking that brings all of these ideas together and radically changes the way in which we live, without us compromising what we have so far achieved. So let’s just do it then.
I’ve decided to lay out how I think society should work on this page (moved to articles section). I’ve been ranting about this kind of thing of late and my workmates have been taking the piss out of me for trying to start ‘Hoylandism’, but I honestly think that we need to create something along the lines of: liberalism, democracy, freedom, environmentalism, aethism (well, okay, secularism anyway), open-source style contribution to government (this guy seems to have come up with something similar, as I’m sure many others have already), etc, etc. Kinda like the good bits from socialism, but without pretending that we are something we’re not. I want to put this out there so that I can find other people who are thinking along the same lines.
Meanwhile, it’s back to work for me….
Posted on 2007-07-24 at 00:00:00
As my good friend and threat to human decency, Matt Balderson would say, I’m a “tax-dodging, supernoodle-eating, fucking steeeeeeeeeeeeew-dent” and have been for some time. In fact, I’m 26 and haven’t quite managed to leave school yet, which is quite an achievement. Actually, I had a couple of years working for a faceless pharmaceutical company as a pharmacologist and corporate whore, but I still lived the student lifestyle. Perhaps more so as I had some money and no work to do after the hour of 4pm back then.
In these 8 or so years of doing the student thang, I’ve lived in many houses, in various places throughout England with lots of different people. I like to think that I’ve lived with some of the best… and alas, with more of the worst. Being a veteran house-mate seeker, this time around, I reckon that I’ve perfected the technique. It goes something a little like this:
First you put up an ad on t’internet (gumtree’s rather good for this) stating your situation, possibly slagging off your current poo-eating, clepto, gothchav, dentist housemate in the process (that was actually her name) and asking for people to look around houses with. You use this as a subtle excuse for going out on the piss. This will give you something to talk about for the rest of the year and, quite frankly, if you can’t get on without the aid of your own bodyweight in alcopiss, then it’s unlikely that you’ll want to move in with that person. If by the end of the night, you are still talking, it’s a good sign and you both arrange to find a third person to move in with and repeat the process. At some point, it might be wise to begin looking for a house as well. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU EVER MOVE IN WITH MORE THAN TWO GIRLS. Girls are genetically programmed to bitch about each other behind each other’s backs. If you have three or more, all hell will break loose by week 4. By week 12 the two that had fallen out will be best friends at the expense of the other one who will then be the bitchee. After that, it gets complicated and requires the application of chaos theory to adequately predict the outcome. Once you have accumulated four housemates/drinking-buddies and a house…erm, well, that’s it really.
This system is the best because if you already rent a house, you’re desperate to fill the room and may have to settle for a weirdo, and if your on your own looking for a room, you’ll be very lucky to get on with everyone and they’ll give you the box room and only half a shelf in the kitchen to put your food on. This way you screen all of the weirdos out and you know everyone will get on with everyone. It does take a bit of time though…. oh and a lot of money. It is fun though :-)
I feel the need to share this beautiful system with the masses, as now I will no longer need it. I have now moved most of my stuff and all of myself over to Marj’s pad. On reflection, I could have cut out the whole house-hunting bullshit and saved myself a good 3 months of evenings and weekends, but we didn’t think it was possible.
In the first year, I’d asked her to move in with me and she said “yes”. There were initial problems: I couldn’t leave Sheffield, and I wanted Marj to move over there with me. This did mean her giving up her well-paid job and was probable not a very sensible thing to do, but it did mean we could live together. A slightly bigger problem was that her “yes” was shortly followed by a, “You do realise that we’d have to get engaged for my parents to be okay with us living together”. To which I replied, “Ughflgrr?” or something equally as eloquent.
The current situation has been made possible by the fact that now I’m not in the lab and am doing computational stuff, I don’t have to be based in Sheffield, so I can live elsewhere and just VPN in. Also, now Marj has been living here for a while, her parents don’t visit ..er…at all (she goes around to theirs all the time). I do feel a little guilty that we’re lying through our teeth to the inlaws. At this point, people would be wise to say things like, “it’ll all end in tears” or “oh what a tnagled web we weave…” or even “You could poke someone’s eye out with that”, however, none of this is enough to outweigh my desire to live with the bestest girl in the whole world (Hoyland poll, 2007), so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens then.
So when my house was falling through and I was pulling my hair out and asking “Where am I going to live if this all falls through”, she simply replied, “Come live with me”. I was initially shocked as I thought we couldn’t but slowly I worked through all of the reasons why I couldn’t to find that they were now obsolete (Even the one about me hating Manchester, but she lives in a ….hang on…. I mean WE live in a nice town out in the sticks just north on Manchester). So here I am, living in the nicest house ever with my girlfriend. The only problems I face are commuting in the Sheffield thrice a week, resisting the urge to beat the little chavs that hang around only on the corner every so often and forgetting that the flush causes a small earthquake to occur in the wall pipes when used at any time passed midnight. All in all, life is good.
But anyway, as I said, I’ve lived with some dicks over the years, but this time around, I was lucky (or the systems perfect, one or the other). This group were a good bunch and I shall miss living with them. It’s a shame we didn’t go out as a group more often, but I am doing a PhD here and everyone else was busy with their work or skint (I’m thinking of you Vicky), etc etc. Ah well, in another life and all that.
And so, yet another group of friends are disbanded to go do their own thing. So here are a few pickies to relive the good times:
(with guest appearance from Dave Rae)
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Oooh - new thing. I’m starting to put little snippets of information at the bottom of this poage for future reference:
Album listening to whilst blogging: The Fray’s “How To Save A Life” then Semisonic’s “Feeling Strangely Fine”.
"'Closure' as they say on t'other side of the pond"
Posted on 2007-07-12 at 00:00:00
Okay, flats off - moving in with Marj is on.
This did present me with the ideal opportunity to send a nasty letter and I do like sending nasty letters. Unfortunately, I read it out to my mum and she said that I shouldn’t drop down to his level. Actually, I thought it presented the ideal opportunity to drop down to his level. After weeks of being nice to someone you can actually see trying their damnedest to milk the situation for every last penny and who constantly tells you how generous they are whilst doing so, and then having the chance to tell him what I think of him, I think I was well within my rights to inflict a few choice words upon him. Besides, I don’t see the problem with the line “…you are either stubborn to the point of ineptitude or are trying to con money out of me…, nor with ending the email, “Up yours sincerely”. Oh well, you’ve gotta keep the old dears happy and all that.
Anyway, this is what was sent:
Mr Vegfli*,
I am writing to inform you that you have given me no alternative but to withdraw my offer to purchase 70 Mitchell Street, as your refusal to provide the necessary legal information as vendor of the property makes it impossible for me to complete the purchase.
My solicitors and myself, together with your estate agent, have made every possible effort to obtain the information from you in order to complete the purchase, but you have repeatedly refused to comply with all requests that would enable the purchase to go ahead, and indeed have made it impossible for anyone to contact you either in person or by telephone in recent days. We have been trying to complete the purchase for almost a week now, but you appear to have provided incorrect information about payment of bills to my solicitor and then have blocked us from talking to the Council to clarify matters, and have also failed to provide even basic information concerning your identity. This means that it is impossible for me (and it will be for anyone else) to complete the purchase.
On the date we were supposed to complete the sale, you proudly announced that you considered you could get more for the property and were showing other possible purchasers round. This, despite the fact that you had agreed a fair price for the property, and the fact that we had reached the actual proposed date of completion.
I consider your behaviour to be totally unacceptable and untrustworthy. You have cost me an enormous amount of money in search fees, legal fees and other costs which will take me a long time to pay back. The time I wasted nor the trust I placed in you, however, I will never get back.
I only hope that you don’t do this to anyone else.
Darren
In actual fact, I think he’s getting off lightly with this version. In mine, I listed all the things he’d done:
- Lied about payi