Moosteria

2011-03-06T15:52:00.000-08:00

I broke my elbow back in December. I've been telling story to people face to face, but for a while was reluctant to commit it to writing. Recently, a friend asked me in email for the story, and so here it is (slightly edited from my reply).

On Christmas Day at about 6pm, I took the dog out for his evening walk. Our usual route takes us to an intersection at Washington Blvd and Ocean Ave, where there is a traffic light. There is a pedestrian phase to the lights, and it was in our favour as we approached. Just as I was about the step into the road, a car came through the red light and stopped to make a right turn. (For non-Americans this is using the right-turn-on-red rule, which says you can make a right turn provide you treat the red light like a stop sign.) He didn't hit me, though with a fraction of a second different in the timing, it would have been a different story. I crossed behind his car, and as I did so, I slapped my hand on the back of the car and yelled. It might not have been the smartest idea, but it something I've done before and I know other people do, simply because there are so many motorists who are completely unaware of pedestrians. I got to the other side of the road, at which point he leapt out of his car, ran across to me and punched me in the face. It actually was not a very hard punch, but I think it might have caught me off balance, and I fell down and landed on my left elbow. He then ran back to his car, got in and drove off, though I was able to get up enough to see his number plate before he turned the corner. This all happened very fast. I don't think it was more than 3 or 4 seconds from when he got out of his car to when he got back in.

At this point, I had no idea that I had broken my elbow. It felt the way it does when you graze it. My initial inclination was to go on with the walk, but I soon decided that was not a great idea, and headed straight home, with Faithless Hound, who had made no effort to defend me, insisting on sniffing every single tree on the route. When we got back, I called to Ellen and took my glasses off to clean them, at which point I found out that the punch had driven them into the bridge of my nose and cut it. I could see that my jacket sleeve was still intact, so it didn't seem likely that this was just a graze. When I took it off and straightened my arm, it hurt a lot more than it had done before, and I could also see a swelling the size of a plum on my elbow. (Ellen says it was the size of an orange, but I think this is an exaggeration.)

I suspect I was in shock at this point, and I wasn't sure whether we should go to the ER, call the police or do nothing. In the end I called 911 to ask for advice, but then decided myself that we should just go to the ER, which is about 15-20 minutes drive from us. They did an X-ray and said that it would probably need surgery and we would have to call an orthopedist to arrange this. They put a splint on, gave me some painkillers (Percocet - Strong Stuff) and sent me home. I really recommend Christmas Day at around 7pm as the time for your emergencies: in and out in less than an hour. They had also called the police, who will often come out to the hospital to take statements, but this time said we should go to the police station. When I arrived, my blood pressure was 167/75, so high that Ellen thought they had misread it. It was down to 127/75 by the time we left. So it's likely I was in shock after the accident.

We then filed a police report at the local police station, and had photos taken of the injury on my face as well as my now-beslung arm. After checking very precisely where the accident happened - it's just on the line between an area policed by LAPD and one policed by LA County - they said we'd hear back from a detective in a few days.

As Christmas Day was a Saturday, it was Tuesday before we could see the orthopedist, who confirmed that I would need surgery to have a steel plate put in. He took one look at the X-ray and said, "that's not going to heal by itself". If the bone fragments can be positioned 50 microns apart they will regrow and join together. Mine were just under 2cm apart. The fractured bone is called the olecranon process of the ulna, basically the cup-shaped bit at the joint. The triceps attach to the part of the bone that had broken and pull it apart when it break. The question was when, as the surgery should really be within two weeks of the injury. We wanted to travel to Mountain View for the New Year feast that our friends Vanda do. His initial inclination was to try to fit the surgery in that week, but in the end he gave the OK, and booked me in for January 5th.

During all this time I had surprisingly little pain. I hadn't taken any of the Percocet, and in fact took very little apart from some ibuprofen. Ellen and I gradually worked out ways of getting things done. I don't sleep well on my back, but if I slept on my side, then I had to twist my back to accommodate the immobilised arm, and so ended up with backache. We solved this by having Ellen shove a pillow in behind me for support once I was settled. Then I was waking up with my shoulder in spasm from being immobilised, so I started doing shrugs and putting a hot water bottle on it before I went to bed. Showering involved me putting my arm in a plastic bag, which Ellen then taped in place so no water got into the dressing. Remarkably, you can wash your right armpit with your right hand in a move I like to call the Funky Gibbon. My hand also swelled up to two or three times its normal size. The orthopedist had made a point of removing my wedding ring when I first saw him, as it would have meant cutting it off if he had left it any later. Or my finger getting gangrene and dropping off, which seemed undesirable.

After New Year, I went in for surgery. It's roughly a two and a half hour procedure which involves bringing the bone fragments back together, and attaching a metal plate. That's what you see on the later X-rays: there are screws going into perpendicular to the ulna, plus one long one under the plate which holds the tip of the bone in place. They can take the metal plate out after a few years, and I've yet to see if it sets off airport metal detectors. The anaesthetist had said he would do a nerve block so that I wouldn't have much pain for a few hours after the surgery. I think it didn't work, as I came round with the worst pain I can ever recall. This one did need Percocet, which unfortunately causes nausea unless you've eaten first. I had a couple of days of feeling generally sorry for myself, going back and forward between being in pain and feeling sick because I'd taken the Percocet to stop the pain. Eventually, Ellen got the doctor to prescribe some anti-nausea medication (as well as Vicodin, which I didn't take), and from then on things improved. The dressing was taken off six days later. The photos of the scar are from just after, when I was sitting in the doctor's office with my Nexus phone to hand. Then it was a matter of regaining my strength and motion through physical therapy, and gradually eliminating the need to use a sling.

I am largely healed now, apart from the last 20 degrees of movement in each direction, which is gradually improving with continued physical therapy. The orthopedist did say I might permanently lose a bit of straightening, perhaps 10 or 15 degrees. The pieces of bone aligned well and have knitted back together, and the scar is fading already. The police tracked found out that the car was a rental, and had been rented by a woman, not the man driving it. There is a little more detail about this, which for now I'll hold back.

VMWare mouse pointer integration

2009-08-21T20:45:00.001-07:00

I've been playing a lot with virtual machines recently, and I intend to write about my experiences and why I wanted to do this another time. For now, here is a small practical tip. All of the main virtual machine packages (VirtualPC, VMWare and VirtualBox) provide mouse pointer integration, which means when the mouse leaves the window of the guest system, it continues seamlessly into the host system. Sometimes this is not what you want, e.g. if the guest system is running software that uses the fact that the mouse has reached the edge of the screen. Some 3D software, including games, makes use of this fact to pan the image. For VirtualPC and VirtualBox, it's easy to turn this off. For VMWare, it is much harder. Some people say that you can add the line vmmouse.present="FALSE" to the configuration (.vmx) file, or to not install the VMWare mouse driver. Neither worked when I tried. What does work is to disable the VMTools service if you have it running. On Windows 2000, you can do this by going to services in the administrative tools (or running services.msc) and stopping or disabling the service. Then the mouse pointer integration will stop as well, at the cost of losing some things like the shared folder functionality.

I know this will be all mumbo-jumbo to most people, but I couldn't find it said explicitly anywhere else, and perhaps it'll help someone out there on the web. Leave me a comment if it does.

2009-08-08T20:01:00.001-07:00

The Google Gadget Editor really is a stinking heap of dung. Amongst the things it gets wrong:

After you open a source file for editing, you cannot delete any characters or lines until you have inserted some.
Indentation is completely up the spout.
Sometimes it adds two blank lines when you hit return in the middle of a line.
Worst of all, when embedded in iGoogle, it sometimes refreshes of its own accord. When this happens, it resets the file you are editing to a default one, and if you had any unsaved changes, they are discarded. At first I thought this was only happening when I left the iGoogle window idle for a while, but I've also had it happen in the middle of editing a file, literally between keystrokes.

It should never have shipped in this state.

Virtual PC, Vista and Ubuntu

2009-08-02T15:45:00.001-07:00

Microsoft have a free download of Virtual PC 2007, which allows you to run virtual machines on your PC. I think it's going to be a standard feature in Windows 7. I have Vista Home Premium, and the installer tells you that it won't work (it says it's only for higher-end versions of Vista), but if you just let it go through the installation, it seems to be OK.

I had an old copy of Win 2k, so I made a guest OS (i.e. an OS running in a virtual machine), and that worked fine. One useful trick to remember is that if the mouse gets stuck in the virtual machine window, press the right hand Alt key to get it back. So next I decided to try installing Linux as guest OS. There is a blog posting which gives some instructions, but unfortunately it didn't work. With Ubuntu 8.04, a dialogue box popped up with an error; with 8.10 and 9.04, I got a stack trace. Fortunately I found another posting with a solution. The key thing seems to be to add noreplace-paravirt and vga=791 to the command line at various stages. The exact way you do this isn't always as described in the posting, at least for 9.04, but otherwise following these instructions seems to work. The only thing that I've not been able to get to work yet is changing the screen resolution to greater than 800x600. There are instructions linked from the second posting, but they didn't work for me.

Why do it? Well, mostly because I can. Occasionally, though, it is useful to run some things under Linux without having to reboot into it.

(Later) After much searching, I found yet another blog post which contains instructions for changing the monitor resolution. This worked!

Dell Studio Keeps Waking Up

2009-06-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

I'll post this on the off chance someone else has the same problem and it helps to fix it. My Dell Studio 540 started refusing to sleep, or more exactly when I set it to sleep, it immediately woke up again. The powercfg utility and the System event log didn't give any useful information. What fixed this was doing to the driver settings (in Device Manager) for the Dell 1505 WLAN card and changing Wake-Up Mode to None. I had hunted around on the Web and not found anything that mentioned this, though there are many other possible solutions for similar problems. I did have an old driver (4.170.25.17 from 2007) and I have since updated it from the Dell web site, so maybe this would also fix it.

2009-06-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

Perhaps everyone on the web has already seen this, but it was new to me. Men in long black robes, riding on Segways, with flaming headdresses, playing music by Philip Glass. A combination of any two of these features would have been amusing, three entertaining, and all four together is just wonderful. They also do Michael Nyman and Mike Oldfield.

2009-06-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Writing in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow says
Search engines accumulate near-complete indexes of our interests, our loves, our hopes and aspirations. Our relationship with them is as intimate as our relationships with our lovers, our confessors, our therapists.
Cory, you need to get out more. Seriously.

2009-05-22T12:23:00.001-07:00

The Guardian has a great example of the kind of article I almost never see in US newspapers, namely a discussion of the philosophical nature of Pringles, as compared to potatoes, with reference to Aristotle, Plato, Kripke, Sartre and Wittgenstein. I especially like this remark:
Sartre, for instance, argued that plants and animals may have fixed essences, but for humans, "existence precedes essence". We can choose what our essences are, potatoes can't.

Using robocopy on Vista

2009-05-02T18:35:00.000-07:00

For a while I've been using robocopy as my Windows backup utility. It's included in Vista, and you can download it for other versions as part of the Windows 2003 server resource kit. It has oodles of command line parameters, and I have it set up so that it copies files incrementally from my local disk to an external one, and also deletes files from the external disk they were copied on a previous occasion but have now been deleted from the local disk. The command line I used was this:

robocopy "c:\Documents and Settings" "e:\Backup\David\Documents and Settings" /R:0 /W:0 /MIR /PURGE /TEE /LOG+:e:\David.log /XD "Temporary Internet Files"

On Vista, I first tried this:

robocopy c:\Users\David %CD%\Backup\David\David /R:0 /W:0 /MIR /PURGE /TEE /LOG:%CD%\David.log

(This is run from the root of the external disk, hence the %CD%).
It doesn't quite work. It creates a deeper and deeper recursive tree for AppData. I think this is because there are some hidden shortcuts and symbolic links. You also get duplicate copies of some files under the Vista Documents folder, which has a secret shortcut from My Documents. So I now use:

robocopy c:\Users\David %CD%\Backup\David\David /R:0 /W:0 /MIR /PURGE /TEE /LOG:%CD%\David.log /SL /XJ /XA:ST

and this seems to do better. /SL doesn't follow symlinks (like tar), /XJ excludes join points (probably not needed). Critically /XA:ST doesn't backup system or temporary files, which seems to be the cause of most of the problems.

J G Ballard has died

2009-04-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8007331.stm

.

2009-04-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

The squazillionaire song writer Pete Waterman has been whining about how he got only $16 in royalties from YouTube for a song he wrote. It's Never Gonna Give You Up, and if you don't know the significance of that, go and google [rick roll]. This misses the point. Any comparably vapid song could have been substituted and the meme would have been the same. The creativity (such as it is) is not in Waterman's work, but in how it's deployed. It seems a bit similar to the arguments over sampling a decade or more ago.

2009-04-05T10:00:00.000-07:00

I had a dream this week, in which I was eating lunch at the Googleplex. It was in the cafeteria on the ground floor of building 42. I looked out the window and there was a giant mechanical cow flying upside down far off in the sky. It got closer and closer and closer and finally burst through the big glass wall of the cafeteria, which shattered into tiny pieces. No-one was hurt, and it turned out this was an entertainment laid on by Larry and Sergey, and they didn't mind the cost of replacing the glass as keeping Googlers happy was more important than profits. And it was only when I woke up that I realized what was so strange about this dream: there is no cafeteria in building 42.

2009-03-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

OK, this probably won't mean anything to my American friends, and my British ones are likely to have already heard of it. I simply couldn't let such an outstanding cultural advance go unremarked. At last, the doner kebab pot noodle. Truly these are the end times.

2009-03-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

I've liked Werner Herzog's films since I saw Aguirre, Wrath of God in the early 1980s. In many ways, I think he's done better work in documentaries of recent years than in his feature films. One in particular I like is Wings of Hope, about a woman who survived falling several thousand feet from a crashing plane into the Amazon jungle. The mock-mockumentary Incident At Loch Ness is also fun.

A metafilter posting this week pointed me towards what claims to be a blog by Herzog written between April and December 2007. I have no way of knowing whether it is really anything to do with him, though I can imagine every entry read in his voice. Two of the last postings, about mice spitting at god and about how to react to tiny people, are examples of what appeals to me about it. Oh, and this one, about not tipping a waiter who says he enjoys his job. They have the same charm as some of Richard Brautigan's stories (particularly the ones in Trout Fishing In America), and to a lesser degree those of Donald Barthelme. They tell a story about a fragment of the world, like the shards that are left over when a gemstone is cut.

A few pictures from agility

2009-03-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

One of the people in the agility class I do with Dylan took some pictures a couple of weeks back. I rather like this one:

It might be subtitled something like "Dylan at a gentle stroll while David tries to keep up".

A couple more:

Oh, and this one. Why are Dylan's cheeks bulging? Because he's just about to make the particular sort of woof that means "give me treats now!".

A notation

2009-03-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Now and again I borrow a book from the library to find that a previous borrower has added their own annotations to the text, usually to correct some kind of perceived error. It's a little puzzling why people do this; neither the author nor the publisher is ever likely to see the annotations (assuming that authors don't tour public libraries sneakily taking a look at their works), and to other readers, it's just a distraction. I suppose in the heat of that form of Tourette's syndrome known as Grammatical Correctness Obsession Disorder, it's hard to resist. It can happen even in the most elevated circles, as the Cambridge UL's page on marginalia and other crimes shows.

What would be even more obsessive than adding such annotations is someone going through them and critiquing them. So how could I resist? If you are the person who made comments on Hart and Boot by Tim Pratt in the paperback copy from Santa Monica Public Library, this is for you.

On page 58, you corrected the possessive of Doug from Doug's to Dougs's, presumably becuase it is modifying a plural (messages). This is incorrect. Dougs's would be the possessive of Dougs. You can see examples of the correct usage, Doug's, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik's A Grammar Of Contemporary English, section 4.101.
On the same page, you corrected She hated making people wait on her to ...for her. It's marginal, but here I think I agree.
On page 73, you removed the comma in a light, unreasonable rain. Wrong!
You changed people go missing all the time on page 94 to people are missing all the time. Not only wrong, but it changes the meaning.
Somewhere (I didn't note it), you missed a typographical error where too appears as to0.
On page 105, you changed unself-consciousness to un-selfconsciousness. I prefer your version.
On page 150, you noted the oddness of his noble face crouched in thought. Yes, it's odd, though no worse than rain being unreasonable on page 73 which you minded less than the comma.
Page 162 has a change from different than to different from. I fart on this one. Lots of people say different than is incorrect, including the odious Strunk. It's totally comprehensible, and that seems sufficient.
Page 187, one of the small pleasures available to we bodiless ones, change to us bodiless ones. Oh, I dunno. I like the original better.
Page 205, and here we reach the last and most glorious of your annotations. A character knows as The Regent refers to another character, Wisp, by name. The annotations says: but cf. p.185, last para, 1st line. It is beautiful that you tell us where to look, but not what the error is, thus engaging our own scholarship. The line cited is My name is not Wisp, but that is what zie calls me. Zie here is a made up pronoun and refers to Howlaa, who is not the regent. So presumably this comment is meant to indicate an inconsistency, that it is only Howlaa calls the narrator Wisp. However, there was a scene on page 192 in which The Regent, Howlaa and Wisp are talking to each other, and Howlaa uses the name Wisp. Hence it's reasonable that The Regent now also knows to call the narrator Wisp. So close, but so far.

Anyway, it's thoughts like this that have made me who I am today.

2009-03-01T09:42:00.001-08:00

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power organizes a pickup for electronic and hazardous waste. They set it up at different locations each month. This weekend it was near to us, and so I uses the opportunity to get rid of some non-functional computers, printers and monitors, as well as lots of out of date medicines. It's very well organized: you drive up and stop on a large plastic sheet, and a team of people wearing protective gear come by and take all the stuff you're dumping. As well as being safe, this also make it fast and efficient. The whole collection was over in about a minute. I imagine that if they had you unload the stuff yourself, as well as being slower, the place would be full of geeks looking to plunder old bits of kit, and, I dunno, junkies looking for tasty drugs.

The medicines disposal is a difference between here and the UK. In Britain, you can take old medicines to any pharmacy, and they will safely dispose of them. Here, the pharmacies will sell you the drugs, and that's the end of their responsibilities. Citizenship and capitalism don't rest well together, I suppose.

Two things I didn't include were an old digital camera and and old flatbed scanner. They both work, but I've replaced them with better ones. Besides giving them away, I've been wondering what I can do with them. I read articles on the web suggesting things like turning the camera into an infra-red camera, by removing the IR filter from the sensor and putting a piece of black film over it instead; and using the scanner as a back for a large format camera to make really high-res pictures. Suggestions (on a postcard) welcome.

2009-02-22T10:30:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, but this choice of ad just amused me.

2009-02-15T20:31:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about blogs is that you can remark on books you are reading without having to even pretend it's anything like a real review. So you can pick out odd little points of interest, and make completely petty digs, as the accident will.

Recently, I've been reading Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston. It got an excellent review in Atlantic Monthly. The book is the first part of a social history of Britain which will eventually cover 1945-1979. Although it does make reference to Big History, most of it draws on personal accounts such as diaries and memoirs and the records made by Mass Observation. Quite a few of the sources are from biographies of well-known people, and their names are simply dropped into the narrative without explaining who they are. It's just assumed that you know enough to British culture to understand. My favourite example of this is in a section talking about the role of high street banks around 1950, which contains this remark:
George Mainwaring, that pillar-of-the-community bank manager at Walmington-on-Sea by now approaching retirement, would no doubt have nodded sagely.
The thing which is wonderful about this is that it doesn't explain who George Mainwaring it. Almost anyone of my age, plus or minus 20 or more years, instantly know that he is a fictional character from a sitcom, Dad's Army. It was made in the 1960s and 70s, but set during the second world war, and Captain Mainwaring was stuffy and opinionated bank manager. So this remark reinforces the tone of the quotation that preceded it because you've seen that program so many time that you can instantly picture him expressing his opinions. Without this explanation, the reader will probably skip this sentence and move on, no harm done. If Kynaston had stopped to explain, his book would have been a leaden mess, and probably twice as long as it is.

When I was checking this, I noticed a wonderfully gnomic line a paragraph later, in which some aphorisms from a stockbroker are quoted as illustrations of his gentlemanly code: "shoes have laces", "motor cars are black", "jelly is not officer food". Funny, I always though it was. Well, not the green jelly, but other kinds.

Scarlett Thomas's novel The End Of Mr. Y is my other current read. It's a book which is almost good, but spoilt by too many long lumps of philosophical explanations, usually in the form of little lectures from one character to another. Well, most of the main characters are supposed to be PhD student or academics, so I suppose it's not all that unrealistic. These discourses are interesting, but there's only so many of them you can hope to get away with in a novel, and N for this novel is greater than so. It's as if the book wants to bend your mind, but can't quite decide in which direction. If the author is anything like the protagonist, then she's a fan of Derrida, and though I have never read any Derrida, language log has given me all the fuel I need to have an irrational contempt for his thought. And, I'm sorry, but the only legitimate reaction to a sentence like Monday morning, and the sky is the colour of sad weddings is a long and loud farty noise.

An update. When I wrote this I hadn't quite finished The End Of Mr Y. Now I have, and (without giving away the ending), I think the author should be ashamed of herself. She uses a twist which belongs to 1950s pulp sf stories, as was hokey even then.

Love On Four Paws

2009-02-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

This week Ellen and I withdrew from Love on 4 Paws, an organization we've been volunteering with for the last 15 months. We were taking our dog, Dylan, to hospitals to do animal assisted therapy, which mostly means visiting patients to cheer them up and give them a brief break from the tedium and stress of being in hospital. The organization is run with careful and constructive discipline by a woman called Suni and her team leaders and coaches. Before you start, the dog passes a "canine good citizen" test and is checked out to see how he reacts in various situations, such as having a lot of people milling round making noise. For the handlers, there's a lot more training in the hospital procedures and the legal requirements.

The first hospital you visit is Shriner's hospital for children (all the locations are in LA). Shriner's is a relatively easy environment to work in, but even so the first few visits were hard work: as well as looking after the dog and setting him up to interact with the patients, there are many hospital protocols to follow. Mostly they are to do with hygiene, such as washing your hands on entering a room, but there are others too. For example, you usually take a picture of the patient with the dog using a Polaroid camera. Occasionally, one picture doesn't come out well, and so you take another, and then you have to remember to hand them all to the patient, or destroy the extra ones, as taking the picture away would break the HIPAA confidentiality rules.

The big step comes when you move to Children's Hospital of LA. Whereas Shriner's is mostly orthopaedic and clinic patients, CHLA has many patients who are very sick with cancer or other serious illnesses. As well as making it a more highly charged environment emotionally, it means the protocols you have to follow are much stricter: no entering certain rooms where a patient is in isolation, wash hands on entry, wipe patient's hands, put an extra sheet on the bed before the dog gets up, wipe patient's hands afterwards, fold up the sheet from the corners inwards... At the end of the first few visits, we were totally wrung out. I also kept making mistakes such as leaving my bag of supplies behind in one patient's room after the visit, then having to try to figure out which room I had last visited to go back and get it. Over time, it got easier, though. In the middle of 2008, we also started visiting St John's, a hospital for adults. The visits are of a different sort there: you tend to spend longer with each patient and see fewer of them. Sometimes in CHLA, the visit is really just a quick snuggle with the dog, a picture, and move on.

With all the training that we as handlers do, there is no training for the dog. Over time, Dylan worked out what he was supposed to do, and for a while seemed to consider it his job. But in the last few weeks, he was getting more and more reluctant to do the visits and at the end was scarcely engaging with the patients. We had said from the start that if we thought he didn't want to do the visiting, we would stop. He seemed to telling us that he didn't want to be there any more, and after a visit to St John's last weekend, we made the decision to stop visiting and leave the organization.

I feel sad about this. It's easy to think that your work matters or that by giving to a charity or participating in a campaigning group that you are changing the world. It's a different thing when you have this direct personal involvement. I saw situations where having a visit from the dog got through to someone who was in distress and pain, and provided them with a moment of respite or happiness. When that happens for a child, it also often helps the parent, a moment of normality in a turbulent time. The medical staff sometimes benefit from a minute or two with dog as well. Even the man who runs the valet parking at one of the hospitals was always happy to see Dylan.

Dylan is quite a shy dog. When he decided he is your friend, he loves you wholeheartedly, but it takes a long time to get there. Other dogs I saw had a temperament that was better suited. Think of your archetypal golden retriever who loves everyone, for example. Calmness is another quality that works well, and that is something that Dylan has once the shyness is out of the way. I saw many skillful handlers too, who have some magic that creates just the right interaction between the dog and the patient.

I'll miss the friends I made in LO4P, and I'll remember the way that at CHLA we all ended by gathering in a ward that had a sun-trap glass roof, resting for a moment after the work we'd done, before setting off on the "dog parade", all the dogs and handlers leaving the ward together.

It came apart in me hands, honest

2009-01-31T12:52:00.000-08:00

Someone broke Google. Then they fixed it. It wasn't me, I swear. Though a colleague did greet me a few weeks back by saying he had brought down YouTube for 15 minutes that day. On the one hand, oops, but on the others, it's kinda cool to have the power to do it.

More exciting than I would like

2009-01-23T20:13:00.000-08:00

Well, we just had a magnitude 3.4 earthquake centered only about half a mile away. It's not the biggest earthquake since we've been living here - there was a 5.2 a bit further away last year - but because it was so close, it felt much more intense. There was probably 10 seconds or rough shaking, compared to 3 or 4 seconds of rolling in the 5.2, just long enough to be scary, especially for the dog.

My first instinct in an earthquake is not to get outside or check for damage. Oh no: it's to go the USGS web site to see where it was and how powerful. And I'm not alone, as several people on the neighborhood mailing list and on local blogs have already posted links to the report: http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/ci10373093.htm.

You do what?

2009-01-17T18:30:00.000-08:00

I've always thought Thomas Friedman is one of those people who counts as a public intellectual without the intellect. There is a nice hatchet job on a recent book of his at nypress. Really, how can you take seriously anyone who can't distinguish a level playing field from a flat one, and who says things like It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel as long as you remember you’re driving without one? No, Mr. Friedman, it's not.

Yodallings

2009-01-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

I have an idea for a blog post which I don't have the skill to execute. So I'll write the bare bones of it here, and then it'll be almost as if I wrote it without actually having to do the work.

Flann O'Brien, when writing as Myles na gCopaleen, published some pieces in the Irish Times which appear to be in Irish, but if read phonetically turn out to be in heavily accented English. For example, one short piece starts

Aigh nó a mean thú ios só léasaigh dat thí slíps in this clós, bhears a bíord, and dos not smóc bíocós obh de trobal obh straigeing a meaits.

which reads as

I know a man who is so lazy that he sleeps in his clothes, wears a beard, and does not smoke because of the trouble of striking a match.

I wanted to put this together with the idea that Japanese uses different orthographies for different things: hiragana for native words spelled phonetically, katakana for imported words spelled phonetically, kanji, which is pictographic, for most content-bearing words, and occasionally romaji, the Latin alphabet you are reading now. So then I might write a little Star Wars parody, in which the country bumpkin hero (るくさかいをくる) speaks hiragana, and the villain (ダルトベイダ), who is clearly foreign, speaks katakana. Yoda would of course speak Kanji, and, just possibly, Wookies and those little teddy bears would use romaji.

Naturally, I would also have needed to think about word order, especially for Yoda. Japanese is a head-final language, which means it generally puts the word with the most oomph at the end of each clause, so for example in a sentence the verb comes last. Thus for "I like drinking beer" you might say something like "watashi wa nomimoni wa biru ga suki desu", which reads roughly as with regards to me, in the matter of drink, beer, likeable is. (With apologies for any errors in this: it's more than 10 years since I studied Japanese.) Then everyone could talk like this, except for Yoda, who would use English word order. Because in the English version of Star Wars, backwards speaks does he.

Alas, I could never take this beyond the germ of an idea. But it does trigger off one other thought. There is a discussion of Yoda's syntax in an old language log posting, in which various word orders for Yoda's speech are discussed, and it is also pointed out that occasionally he follows ordinary English word order. The question that troubles me is that given that he can follow English word order, why doesn't he do so all the time? He has had (we assume) several hundred years of exposure to the the language, which is surely enough to smooth out his idio-grammatical quirks and get him to native speaker competence. Speaks funny, then why does he? I believe there can only be one answer: that Chomsky was right all along. The innate language component of Yoda's brain is such that he intrinsically cannot get the words in the right order, no matter how much he studies and attends the Berlitz school for Jedi. The universal grammar of Yoda sapiens just won't allow it.

Riddles in the light

2009-01-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

I've had some fun over the last year with online riddle games. A couple of years back, I played Qwyzzle after reading about it in Alison Scott's Live Journal. It is an example of the "URL-changing" style of riddles, in which you get a web page which contains a puzzle to solve, and then change part of the URL based on the solution to advance to the next puzzle. As far as I can tell, Qwyzzle is now off-line, though there are many others like it.

Late in 2007, a metafilter posting directed me to a list of room escape games. These are usually built with Flash, and typically have a scenario where you have to escape from a locked room by finding and combining objects and solving brain teasers. Most of them are of poor quality, partly in the game mechanics (pixel-hunting, for example), but more particularly because the puzzles are often rather arbitrary or just daft, and they didn't really hold my interest for long. (With one exception: the submachine series by Mateusz Skutnik).

The same list also included The Roomz. Superficially, this looks like other room escape games, but is really closer to the Qwyzzle genre. It consists of a number of levels, each with a password that gets you to the next one. Some of the early levels are a bit like point-and-click games, but most of them involve breaking codes and solving logic puzzles, sometimes with a bit of lateral thinking thrown in. I don't want to reveal any details, but to give an outline of one "room", you start by seeing some pictures and a string of letters. Working out who and what the pictures refer to gives you a lead in to what kind of code it is and the keyword to break it, and this gets you to the password. This is an early puzzle and is a fairly simple one. By the end (room 45), you are solving multi-layered puzzles, in which you need to crack codes, solve cryptic clues, assemble information from the web (or your own head, if it already contains what you need to know), and make a few inspired guesses. It took me about four or five months to get through the whole of The Roomz, with probably a month or more on the last room alone. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I solved the last puzzle while at work, in a particularly tedious meeting.

The Roomz was a good experience, both for the puzzles themselves, and also because it has a supportive and helpful forum for getting you past points where you just can't see what to do next. After I finished it, I cast around for something new to play. Clever Waste Of Time is one that many people speak highly of, but I didn't like that to solve some of the puzzles you end up installing extra software, and also that the forum has a rather hostile feel to it. Eventually, I came across The Labyrinth (and Labyrinth II) at puzzlefiles. In presentation style, it is very different to The Roomz: each puzzle is simply a web page with low-fidelity graphics and a text field to enter the solution. However, the puzzles have the same multi-layered nature, with codes and numerical and word games, and in many cases the need to make an intuitive leap once you've done the initial stage. It also has a forum which, like The Roomz, has people willing to be helpful and constructive. With some of the harder puzzles, I needed to get a gentle hint, then less gentle nudge, and sometimes thundering great shove to figure out what was going on. I finished the two labyrinths after about 7 months, with some longish breaks at various stages.

I found both The Roomz and the two Labyrinths engaging in the same way that a good cryptic crossword in the British style is. They mix conventions (e.g. "blind" often indicates there is some Braille in the puzzle just as broken signals an anagram in a crossword), a set of solving techniques which you might recognize when you see them or might require you to work out something new, and some leap in the dark guesswork. And there is same a-ha feeling when a particularly difficult puzzle resolves. Of the two, The Roomz has richer interaction, though the puzzles are a bit easier and occasionally become formulaic. The Labyrinths have harder and more disciplined puzzles, with a less interesting visual style. I've not yet found a new game to move on to, though some of the puzzles at puzzletome look promising.

(BTW: The Roomz only works with IE. I've had some weirdness in retrying it after recent Flash updates, though not enough to make it unplayable.)

Strange books

2007-07-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

I was searching on Amazon for a beard trimmer, and included in the results were these:
Earn Extra Money In Your Spare Time Selling Beard And Mustache Trimmers On-line by James Orr and Jassen Bowman (Audio CD - 2007)
and
The Guru's How To Earn Extra Money, Godfather Principles and Accounting & Finance for Beard And Mustache Trimmers Businesses 3 CD Power Pack by Raul Z Thomas (Audio CD - 2007)

I have to think there is some automated script gone mad here.

July 4th

2007-07-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the day when, in the words of Apu from The Simpsons, you "celebrate your country's independence by blowing up a small part of it". Our local fireworks display starts at 9pm, and since about mid-day, there have been occasional detonations, crackles and screamers. I expect we'll get the same for a few more days or (if last year is a guide) even occasionally for a couple of months.

My dog, Dylan (http://picasaweb.google.com/animoose/Dylan), hates it. He retreats to his crate, which is his normal place of safety, with his tail tucked right down. As the bangs get louder, he will shake and pant with fear, and look for other hiding places (the shower, closets). He's not the only dog in the neighbourhood who gets like this. Some people on our street have a big, bouncy Chesapeake retriever, who turns into a nervous wreck today. It's very sad to see. If we could just have one official display, it would not be so bad. Poor guys.

Isaac Guillory

2007-07-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

It was nice to see a posting on metafilter about Isaac Guillory (http://www.metafilter.com/62569/Isaac-Guillory-performs-in-Berkeley) with links to videos of him in performance. He was a fine musician and a very engaging person. You walked way from his performances feeling the world was a better place.

I noticed that one of the comments on the videos was by bzeliotis. He was my guitar teacher in Cambridge around 1991-92, and he refers to a concert we were both at.

More reasons why the iPod is crap

2006-07-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

Following my recent post about Apple's economy with the truth concerning the iPod battery life, I wanted to add a couple more reasons why I think the iPod is crap, or at least not as good as Apple would like you to think.

First, I've had the experience just after turning it on or after shuffling songs that the controls become unresponsive for 20-30 seconds. It's OK if this is happening because the iPod needs to do some computation. It's not OK that there is no indication of a delay in the user interface. Apple included the hourglass in what they stole from Xerox for the Mac UI: why couldn't they do it for the iPod?

Secondly, suppose you have the iPod set up to shuffle by album. You are half way through an album when the battery runs low and so you connect it up. When you next turn it on, it has reshuffled the playlist and started you on a new album. This is true even if no new music was downloaded, and even if you have manual synchronization set up.

Oh, and another thing. The capacitative touch control is all very well, but don't try using it too close to your Blackberry. The radio signal from the Blackberry presumably causes electrical discharge through your fingertips, and so the controls go mad. You have to think there are some Blackberry users amongst Apple's so-called design team who might have noticed this and considered a different sort of control. I wonder what happens if you use the iPod in a thunderstorm?

Apple iPod Battery Life

2006-07-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

Apple's figures for the battery life on a iPod are misleading, disingenuous, or at least economical with the truth. For a fifth generation, 30G iPod, they say 14 hours music playing time on a fully charged batter. If you think you are getting less than this, you can run a test using a methodology listed here. Basically, you set your iPod to play a single album on repeat, with the backlight and EQ turned off. Repeating the same album means there is little or no disk access, and turning off EQ reduces extra computation. If you get less than half the specified time, you can consider the battery faulty.

So another way of putting this is that the battery life is between 7 and 14 hours, provided you are using the iPod in completely unrealistic way. If you ever use the backlight, shuffle the playing order, or skip tracks, you get far less.

On the test, my iPod gave 11 hours and 10 minutes, about the in the middle of the range. In my typical use, with no EQ and the backlight timer set to 5 seconds, I get between 3 and 4 hours, which is barely acceptable.

Apple like to present themselves as a white knight: we are good for our users and morally better than the other guys. Well, they've always been better at projecting an image than creating a reality. This is the company who forced the one-button mouse on us, or made out that a Mac was better because it had a case made of translucent blue plastic, and who are currently advertising themselves as better than Microsoft by means of sneering at them. I think I would rather they put their efforts into being more honest about themselves.

2006-01-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

In a second hand bookstore, I bought a book called Famous Potatoes. On the second page, someone has written the single word Vibrators. It's the only annotation in the whole book. I wonder why: a shopping list? a mild epithet?

Eat my cycles

2006-01-04T14:44:00.000-08:00

I was noticing that my new Thinkpad was running very slowly. It would sometimes take several minutes to remove the screen saver (which is, if course, totally unnecessary for an LCD, but that's another story). Checking System Monitor in the wonderful Google Sidebar showed me the CPU was at 100%, and the Windows task manager showed that a process called QCTRAY.EXE was responsible. This proved to be the Thinkpad utility for switching between different location profiles. I also have this on my work Thinkpad, where it is somewhat useful, but for my home laptop I don't really need it. It's one of those annoying things that starts up on boot, off a key in the registry. It seems to work just as well if you start it manually, so deleting the key doesn't mean losing it completely. A quick edit to the registry and things get much better. Quite why it took all the CPU is a mystery. Lenovo's web site suggests it has a bad interaction with Symantec Anti-Virus, but I switched to MacAfee as Symantec is such a pile of poo, so that doesn't seem like why.

While I'm on this subject...

2006-01-02T18:41:00.000-08:00

At the risk of revealing that I really am a middle-aged curmudgeon, here is a companion piece to my rant about Lenovo. The subject this time is UPS. We ordered a new bed for our dog a short while back, and arranged for UPS to ship it. No one was at home the first day they tried to deliver it, and they left a note saying we could ring up to set a new delivery time. This actually seemed to mean a new delivery day, as they wouldn’t commit to any specific time: it could be from 9am until 7pm., they said. As the dog by this stage was weak from lack of sleep, I stayed in all day so as not to miss it. No UPS delivery. Oh dear, they said, tomorrow we’ll deliver it in a mutually agreed two-hour window. Again, no delivery the entire day.

Contacting UPS, by the way, means ringing a central number, navigating the call center, and talking to a person who says it’ll all be OK, but otherwise has no power to set the delivery time. If you call the local depot, the phone rings and rings and rings, but no-one answers. So the next time we called, we escalated it to a supervisor. After checking with the local depot, he told us that the bed wasn’t delivered the last time because they had put it in a big trailer out the back, but they weren’t sure which one, and they’d forgotten all about it anyway. Tomorrow they’ll be trying again. If it fails this time, I’m strongly tempted to ship them a small package delivered by the dog.

Is my computer a vegetable?

2006-01-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

I feel a rant coming on.

In early December, I ordered a new laptop, a Thinkpad. I've had five Thinkpads over the last 10 years, and have found them to be much better than any other laptop I've used (a couple of Dells, an odious HP, and a fashion accessory called a Powerbook). When IBM sold off their Thinkpad operations to the Chinese company Lenovo, many people expected the quality to decline. This appears not to have been the case. Thinkpads are as good as ever, and have even added some whizzy gadgets like fingerprint authentication and disc protection for the levobipedal amongst us.

Where Lenovo seem to have compromised is in the quality of their operations. Let's take it step by step. It took me four days to place an order through their web site. For the first three days, I'd get to the stage of placing an item in the so-called cart, only to get a database error. This was eventually fixed. The best Lenovo customer service could offer was "keep trying". Choosing the model was also confusing: they display hundreds of Thinkpad variants on the site, with very little to guide you to a choice. The division by the basic models (T, R, X, etc.) is a reasonable top-level distinction, but then within each model they are classified as ThinkExpress, Standard and Custom, with no explanation of how the first two of these differ. There does not seem to be a rational system behind the pricing. I ended up with a model with more disc than the one I had originally decided on for less money.

Lenovo were quoting 10 day delivery on the web site. By the time of the order, this had gone up to 15, which was annoying but not an uncommon experience. In fact, they shipped it after 12 days. I had paid for 2-day UPS shipping and as it was shipped on December 13th, you'd expect it to arrive on Dec 15th, right? It actually arrived on December 27th. Lenovo ship from the far East to Ontario, California (it's in or near LA), and that is where the problems arose. Here is what the UPS tracking said (slightly edited and reformatted):
Dec 14, 2005 1:06 P.M. ONTARIO, CA, US
THE SHIPMENT IS BEING HELD BY BROKERAGE FOR REASONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL
Some quick web searching (with Google - it's good, isn't it?) suggested that this is not an uncommon experience, and it allegedly happens because Lenovo botch the paperwork. Due to the way they do importing they can't just fax a correction, but have to resend the whole documentation, and if it is still wrong, they have to go round this loop until they get it right. Repeated emails to Lenovo customer service resulted in two things: about 25% of the time, I got a non-committal reply with no useful information, and the remainder of the time, I got no reply at all.

Finally, on Dec 22nd, the hold was released, and this appeared on the UPS tracking:
Dec 22, 2005 1:14 P.M. ONTARIO, CA, US
THE SHIPMENT IS BEING HELD BY BROKERAGE FOR REASONS BEYOND UPS' CONTROL;BROKERAGE RELEASED SHIPMENT. SHIPMENT IS SUBMITTED TO CLEARING AGENCY FOR FURTHER CLEARANCE
1:14 P.M. ONTARIO, CA, US
PACKAGE WAS DELAYED BY A FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION HOLD.
It is not totally clear to me why the FDA should need to check my laptop (insert random joke about Apple here). Perhaps they thought it was a vegetable. The hold was released the next day, just in time to get it delivered on the last business day before Christmas. Except it wasn't, and I had to wait until Tuesday.

I emailed Lenovo suggesting they should refund the extra $50 I paid for 2-day shipping, as it had taken more than two days. They agreed, but in an oblique way that gives the impression they will get you the refund but without actually giving any indication of how to make it happen.

Here's a final area where I think Lenovo are cutting costs. The laptop arrived with no recovery CDs, and very little documentation. The preinstalled software (including the OS) is on a special partition on the hard disc. This has two disadvantages: it takes between 10 and 15 GB off the disc capacity, and if the hard disc fails, you're stuffed. You can create recovery CDs from the disc; it takes 7 of them, and you can only do it once, due to Windows XP licensing.

I'm sure that in a week or two, I will have ceased to think about any of this. I like my instant gratification, and I like it now, so to get these delays is really a petty annoyance. But if I buy another Lenovo product, I'll be checking them out more carefully before I go ahead.

2005-12-29T15:40:00.000-08:00

Huntington library gardens

2005-09-28T20:35:00.003-07:00

Dylan

2005-09-28T20:35:00.002-07:00

2005-09-28T20:35:00.001-07:00

2005-09-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

2005-09-08T20:54:00.000-07:00

Gnaw

2005-09-08T20:53:00.001-07:00

Munch

2005-09-08T20:53:00.000-07:00

Arrfff!

2005-07-31T14:23:00.000-07:00

The Grayson Ave block party, 30 July 2005. The block boogies to the Canalligators.

2005-07-31T14:22:00.003-07:00