There was another amazing fancy dress party round Ana’s house. This time it was on Valentines day, with a bloody valentines theme. I did the old flour-on-the-face trick and put on a suite and bow tie, while Francine dressed in a scraggly wedding dress. Then we both applied fake blood liberally.
Our blood recipe was scarlet food colouring with water and cornflour stirred in to thicken it a little, but then to make it less vibrant pink we added a dash of soy sauce!
It turned out pretty well. We felt compelled to spend some time coming up with a decent effort for fancy dress to try and live up to our robot costumes at last year’s party and awesome 80s look the year before that (you may have seen pics on facebook)
I clocked up another passing out incident on Wednesday. Over the years I have passed out on two and half previous occasions. Wednesday’s was the weirdest yet given that it came more or less out of the blue while I was in the office sat at my desk. I felt a strange chest pain, and then started feeling dizzy, and that was it.
It was also strange to pass out in front of the boss. He was just over from the U.S. so I hadn’t seen him in a while. As usual I came to with a curious feeling as if I was coming out of a long dream. …and there was my boss talking to me. I sat myself up and then promptly passed out again. Then I remember dreaming about this weird situation where I had passed out in the office in front of my boss, and I came out of the dream and realised it was true. This time he told me to stay lying down until the ambulance arrived.
The ambulance crew reminded me that raising your legs above your head makes you feel a lot better when feeling faint (The same trick worked well on the ski-lift occasion) When I got to A&E they probed and poked me, and measured my blood pressure many times. Chest x-rays and heart scans all showed up normal, so it all remains unexplained.
Rather worryingly though, I still have a painful tightness in my chest which gets worse during exercise or exertion. Age 29, a heart problem seems unlikely. Hopefully it will turn out to be some kind of temporary digestion or breathing problem.
We had a little “pumpkin party” on Halloween. This involved no dressing up whatsoever, but cracking open a bottle of wine and trying out some pumpkin recipes. Very civilised.
So using the orange gack from the brains of the pumpkin, we had a Brazilian pumpkin coconut concoction which was intense but yummy. We roasted the pumpkin seeds, which was …well I burnt them. And finally we made a pumpkin pie, which was surprisingly good. That’s following this pumpkin pie recipe (pants website alert) ….evaporated milk being the most awkward ingredient, but happily our friendly local Indian/Turkish/Caribbean/weird-jars-of-stuff corner shop had it.
Then we carved a silly face of course.
Even our American friend was impressed by the pumpkin pie, and she should know a good pumpkin pie (thanksgiving?) Halloween is a pretty American thing of course, but she told me it’s from Ireland actually. ….”Origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain” according to the all knowing one.
I finished reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it a couple of days ago, but previously (having read most of it) I went along to the Innovation Reading Circle where seven or eight people sat around discussing the book.
Cyber law expert, Jonathan Zittrain, argues in this book, that that the internet’s future could be bleak, as we see it become more locked-down, less free and open and less inviting of innovation. He uses the term “generativity” to describe technologies which provide open platforms for tinkering and unexpected invention. The internet itself is generative at various layers, and our “end-point” PCs are also built to be generative, but new devices are less so. Tethered to their supplier and restricted in their programmability, these otherwise highly capable web-enabled devices represent a shift towards an undesirable future for the internet. Problems like spam and viruses, the downside of open generativity, may drive change through market forces, or ill-conceived legal interventions which fail to take account of the value of generativity.
The book’s title is obviously deliberately provocative, and in our discussions we were largely trying to decide whether he was overstating the doom and gloom. On the whole I felt that he constructed a detailed end-to-end argument and unlike the title, he didn’t really push an overly alarmist message that disaster is inevitable. Nonetheless I did find myself convinced that there is a problem with the way the internet is going, and whilst we can surely rely on market forces to keep us from some kind of total internet lock-down, the pendulum could still swing quite heavily in that direction if the consuming public and the law-makers do not grasp the issues.
And perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book, was that it did need a whole book (or at least the first two thirds of the book) to explain the issues from top-to-bottom. The merits and abuses of generativity ripple up and down the full technology stack, presenting recurring legal and technical cat and mouse games at every level. Take a narrow viewpoint, and the solutions seem simple.
I generally dislike pharmaceutical companies, especially cosmetics companies. I could pretend that I have strong ethical, ecological, political rational reasoning behind this. There’s so much to dislike about them. But really I just instinctively dislike them. In a chemist I find the air choking with all the smelly overpriced beauty products. I grab my 55p litre bottle of apple flavoured shampoo and get out as quickly as possible.
But right now I’m particularly thinking about the TV adverts. Cosmetic TV adverts are certainly among the worst kind (well the worst kind generally allowed on british TV, which thankfully has some fairly strict vetting) Do they think we don’t notice the ludicrously bad lip-synching? L’Oreal have always advertised a lot on TV. Their latest ad has that woman from four weddings and funeral, talking about wrinkles. She says:
“…I call them my life story lines”
Why?? No you don’t! Nobody has a special name for their wrinkles! Shut up!
Went to visit Nick in Northampton the other day. We went paintballing and then had a look around Northampton the next day.
Paintballing was a lot of fun. It’s the second time I’ve done it, but the previous occasion was an indoor place in a dark warehouse somewhere near Kings Cross. This time it was the proper outdoor stuff. We drove over to Cambridgeshire to apocalypse paintball . I found paintballing gave me a good adrenaline rush. More than I expected. It was also quite scary at times, crouching behind a log as gunshots pelted the trees above me. The last game was a “free for all” in quite a confined area, which was comical. Maybe I should have moral objections to running around with guns simulating war… but it’s fun. I also thought that the stories of paintballs being very painful, is a bit over-egged. You certainly feel it when you’re hit, but it’s not agonising or anything. Maybe only if you cop one at point blank range. They were pretty careful about safety, bollocking people for removing their masks etc, unlike the experience Stuart had doing 4×4 driving
Northampton was… interesting. We visited the bus station, which was voted one of the worst pieces of architecture in the country. And we visited the Northampton museum, which was all about shoes, but also featured a video display with hilariously cheesy opening music. The only line I could remember was “Cant wait to be… in Northampton”, so it took me a while to find what this was, but actually I need look no further than the wikipedia Northampton article “The Northampton Development Corporation produced a single that was released nationally by EMI, entitled 60 Miles by Road or Rail, by Linda Jardim”. So now you know.
Today in Upperthong the cloud base is at approximately 673 metres…
…acording to the Upperthong weather station
I get on my train back to Baden, on my way back from the end-of-season snowboarding weekend in Flumserberg. I have a ludicrously red sun-burnt face. Zurich Hauptbahnhof is bustling as ever, but this time there’s not so many skis and snowboards being carried around. Seems the Swiss dont bother much towards the end of the season.
On the platform there’s a guy with a moustache and a guy without a moustache. They stand there together, while everyone walks past. They have their arms around each other’s backs.
My impression of Switzerland so far has been based on the family-oriented church-going communities around Baden. I’m imagining Swiss society to be a little backward with regard to homosexuality, so I’m a little surprised to see these blokes in a homosexual embrace in such a public place. But then again, Zurich is a big city, and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see it in London.
A middle-aged woman is sitting near me. She’s chubby and has a motherly look about her, which seems to be typically Swiss. She’s like every other family-oriented church-going Swiss woman I’ve seen living around Baden. She stares at the man with the moustache, and the man without a moustache. I am imagining it is a disapproving stare.
But the train starts to move. She waves to them. She presses her face to the window, and continues to wave until they are out of site, and then she slumps in her seat and is obviously trying hard not to cry.
…weird
Last weekend I roller-bladed 12.5 miles around London in a group of over a hundred people. The friday night skate really is great fun. It’s very well organised. They have ‘marshals’ wearing luminous tops, who keep everyone together, and stop the traffic while everyone zooms past. They have a map of the weekly route, weather cancellation information on the website. The route is always in two halves, the second half being faster, for the better skaters.
You have to be pretty good at roller-blading before you should attempt it, because they go fast and they huddle together in a big herd of inter-tangling legs, but if you are a competent street skater, and you find yourself in London on a Friday, I heartily recommend it!
There was another amazing fancy dress party round Ana’s house. This time it was on Valentines day, with a bloody valentines theme. I did the old flour-on-the-face trick and put on a suite and bow tie, while Francine dressed in a scraggly wedding dress. Then we both applied fake blood liberally.
