No time this time

Bit of a git, this: some bizarre/wonderful/baffling/amusing/etc things have happened this week, about which I want to blog, but I’m too deeply enmeshed in How2 scrips to do them justice. They’ll have to wait, but meanwhile here’s a bit of a taster:

This week, I’ve been sent pictures of hedges, and a mysterious/anonymous postcard of a camel, attached to which is a newspaper headline about assault with fish. One of the correspondents may be miffed at being out-weirded by the other, though I’m not sure which way round that works.

Today, I built a large lifting gantry with multiple pulley blocks. It nearly worked. Then a chap from Glasgow Science Centre and I fired potatoes into a bucket of flour. This was fun. Yesterday, we were mostly carving ‘amusing’ animals out of hot dogs. My correspondents (see above) have some way to go.

One friend/colleague has been offered a terrific job: I’m delighted for him. However, this drops me in the schtuck for my next job, since the terrific job isn’t the one I’d offered him. Said friend/colleague (henceforth called ‘Gavin,’ for shorthand. And also because that’s his name) is, unfortunately, rather difficult to replace. Imagine my surprise, then, when a chap I very vaguely know of rang me to see if I had any work going: it transpires he’s exactly the person I’m looking for, and this is exactly the job he’s looking for. Bonus.

Digital cameras are not only fun, they’re terrific tools. I should have bought one years ago. I still should.

The gradual manner in which John is revealing his latest endeavour is particularly pleasing: in the morass of information immediacy that is the web, the measured pace is refreshing. I want to see how the story ends, but I want the steady lifting of veils to continue.

Scripts. Tomorrow: rehearsal. Tuesday: Studio.

Routers

Time to configure Netgear DG834G wireless firewalling ADSL router: three minutes. Required information: username and password for Pipex – everything else autodiscovered. Setting changes made: temporarily disabled WiFi.

Time to configure Mac: thirty seconds.

Time to configure WinXP PC: about twenty minutes, struggling to work out what the heck it wanted me to do in the control panel until discovering that yanking the cable out of the network card and shoving it back in again suddenly made the DHCP thingy pick up the information the router was merrily throwing at it. [sigh]

Anyway, happy now. I no longer have to rely on the (noisy, unreliable, badly-firewalled) PC for broadband routing – it’s all going through a nice shiny silver box instead.

Er… categories, Jonathan. Must add categories… then a version of the front page without the ‘geek’ entries…

Sloppy language

When I see a headline like this: “Red sea urchin ‘almost immortal’“, I assume it’s another case of a duff journo being sloppy with his language. ‘Almost immortal’ being an oxymoron, and all.

But no, it turns out that the line is a sub-edited quote from one of the scientists involved in studying the ‘practically immortal’ red sea urchin. Gee, I’ve real faith in that research.

Refactoring

A couple of days ago, somebody gave me an organisational problem without an obvious solution. This morning I had a thought that may give me a way around it; tonight I found myself saying ‘I haven’t solved the problem yet, but I may have a way of recasting it such that it’s more readily solvable.’

I don’t recall using that particular turn of phrase since I was an undergrad. ‘Non-trivial’ I use… actually, I over-use. And there are several other Cambridge-induced phrasings that still wheedle their way into, if not daily, perhaps monthly life. But this is one I’ve not called on for many a moon.

Welcome back, old friend.

Martian hyperbole

Cripes. I’m writing a script about using the X-Plane flight simulator to explore Mars from the comfort of your bedroom. Yes, it has a full terrain map – cool, huh?

Anyway, I wrote a wrap-up line, in standard hyperbole style:

So that’s how you can explore Mars in your bedroom – and if you ever go there in person, you’ll know what to expect.

Only after I’d written it did I realise that some of the viewers of this show actually might go to Mars. You’ve got to consider it at least somewhat possible within the next thirty years, and seven year-olds now – well, they’d be bang in the right demographic.

Now there’s a thought. Sometimes I forget that I grew up watching Johnny Ball and How, and owe a considerable fraction of my enthusiasm for science and engineering to them. Kids today have got… er… the shows I make. Sure, there are lots of hands-on centres and all that – but in terms of reach, well… blimey, that’s sobering.

Perhaps it’s better that I don’t quite grasp this. I kinda wish I hadn’t heard Jamelia on the Radio 1 Chart Show the other week saying how much she liked the show, you know?

xScope

As if Exposé hadn’t already convinced us that a system-wide hardware accelerated GUI is a Seriously Good Thing, The IconFactory’s latest gizmo xScope hammers home the point that systemwide transparency support is Oh So Ludicrously Cool. We’ve seen on-screen rulers before, but this is ridiculous.

Mac users: download, play, join me in wishing you had a big web design project to do just so you could use this stuff in anger. Windows users: sorry, you’ll have to wait for Longhorn in 2006 or so before you get things like this.

Was that smug? That sounded a little smug. Sorry.