The Daily Grind

Years back, I missed the very first Café Scientifique held in the UK, despite working across the road from the venue. Ironically, I missed it because I was working for the organiser, and he’d sent me away to shoot some interview or other.

I didn’t miss Glasgow’s Science Café on Monday evening, however. This was lucky, because I was the speaker.

Surprisingly, I found myself a tad nervous, but it seemed to go well enough. I was talking about the past and present of science television for children, which of course leads us to the point where there isn’t any. Pleasingly, there was a rather positive reaction to the reveal moment of “…this has never been about the television, it’s always been about inspiring children with science. If television is no longer a means to that end, let’s find a better way of doing it.”

The discussion was interesting, and useful. There’s usually somebody who’s a bit grumpy about ‘entertainment’, and wonders whether there’s really any science involved in SciCast. This is tricky, because I pretty much have to confess that they’re right to be concerned. However, I can’t address everything at once, and monitoring factual content is something that I’ve simply had to punt into next year (or so). Happily, Glasgow’s curmudgeon turned out to be thoroughly charming, and indeed pragmatic. Rather more concerned than curmudgeonly, in fact – but isn’t ‘curmudgeon’ a lovely word? Anyway…

Heaven knows what the audience got out of it, but the evening was extremely useful for me. One of these days I’m going to have to pitch SciCast seriously, and it’s good to practice articulating the arguments.

Plus, it was gratifying to meet a couple of kids who are watching The Big Bang in repeats on CITV, and loving it. Yay!

There’s a new pencil in my life.

For years, I bought Rexel Cumberland Derwent Graphics, made at my favourite pencil factory in Keswick. Yes, I had a favourite pencil factory – mostly because of this one glorious range. The graphite was smooth, silky, and a pleasing mid-slate colour, but I liked them not so much for their writing action as for their feel in my hand.

See, Derwent Graphics weren’t just smooth and black – they were really really black. Matte black. One didn’t merely pick them up: one’s hands were caressed by them. The sensuous body, the jaunty gloss orange ring, the contrast with the squeaky gloss black heel of the pencil…

They were glorious pencils. Glamorous pencils. Dangerously sexy pencils. Pencils for people who adored pencils. Pencils for people who were, perhaps, vaguely fetishistic about pencils. We didn’t quite meet on furtive street corners and obsess over a 6H, but just like Moleskine aficionados or Crumpler fans, we acknowledged each other with a knowing nod when, by chance, we happened across a fellow devotee.

We loved our Derwent Graphics.

So they changed them.

As of a few years back, the modern Derwent Graphic is no longer matter black, but rather bears a uniformly gloss finish. The whole point of the pencil – its feel in the hand – is destroyed.

So, I complained. At the factory. I walked into the shop and asked if they had any of the old ones left over. It turned out they’d been dealing beneath the counter (literally), to people like me. Tragically, they’d run out of even this illicit stock, and search parties of sales assistants and even middle management could turn up no more. “We know,” they said, sadly, “They were lovely pencils to hold.”

For the last three years I’ve been nursing my dwindling supplies, eeking them out, my heart heavy as every turn of the sharpener sloughed off another fraction of my future graphitic pleasure.

No more.

Last weekend, at Salt’s Mill, I happened across the Lyra Art Design range.

Fine pencils. Good leads. Good weight. And… and… and… matte black. With a cheeky glossy ring and a stub-end in glossy black; the former white rather than orange and the latter a hair too short, but no matter:

The world once again has matte black pencils.

Oh, happy day.

There’s a bit of a craze going on taking £280 Advent 4211 subnotebooks from PCWorld and hacking them to run Mac OS X 10.5. You have to open them up to swap out the WiFi card, and there are sound issues, and the screen is still small, and and and… Advice thread here.

Very tempting. I was playing with an early EeePC the other day and found the keyboard basically unworkable; the 4211/Wind looks like it’s much better in that department, though the battery life isn’t great.

I’d be entirely happy with a Linux subnotebook, but for two things: iPhoto and iMovie. Kvatch.

Lovely dinner last night with Rosie and George, the schedule for their new flat (woohoo!), their wonderfully expressive greyhound Neela, and exactly 391 pictures of Ecuadorian monkeys.

They’ve been in the rainforest for the last two months.

Not with the dog. The dog was being pampered with fresh linen sheets and fluffy towels in a dog hotel somewhere (that’s what they’re like, right?). And they didn’t take the pictures to show the monkeys in the monkey sanctuary, that would be pointless. The pictures came out of the…

Oh, look, they’ve been caring for monkeys. In the jungle. For a while.

I… may be a little confused.

Perhaps it was the 391 pictures.

This is just amazing:

(via Mike Sizemore, who has far more eloquent things to say about it than I could, so I’ll shut up.)

I just completed an online survey about my use of Final Cut Studio, for Apple software research. It doesn’t appear to be under any sort of NDA, so I guess I can pass on what I found interesting:

Most of the questions were routine profiling stuff – trying to get a picture of the range of uses to which I put the products. Describing myself as dissatisfied with Soundtrack Pro and Qmaster led to additional questions asking me why, that sort of thing.

But a whole batch of questions were about review processes, and how I seek feedback and signoff from my clients. Do I send them DVDs, put Flash video on a webserver, or send them tape? Do I get feedback via email, phone call, or annotations on the web video?

Oh, please please tell me that Final Cut Studio 3 – presumably coming next year, and a significant rewrite to Cocoa/64bit if it’s going to be Snow Leopard-native – will include some sort of work-in-progress review module. That could rock.

At the moment I’m cobbling together simple websites with Flash movies for my clients to view. It works, but I’d love:

• That process to be automated from within Final Cut.
• My clients to be able to scribble annotations directly on the video
• To be able to load those annotations into Final Cut as timeline markers.

That would be sublime.

Given an either/or choice between this and Soundtrack Pro actually, you know, working, I’d plump for the latter without hesitation. But would it be wrong of me to ask for ‘both’?

“I remembered to put sugar in it this time,” said my mum, as she handed a steaming mug of tea to Flossie.

Wait – yesterday Flossie drank a mug of tea with neither sugar nor complaint?

“Yes. I often drink tea without sugar, if I haven’t any to hand.” She confessed this in a remarkably matter-of-fact tone, considering my ensuing horror.

Every relationship is based on trust, on certainty, on specific immutables. In our case: how we, respectively, take our tea. And now I discover that Flossie has been lying to me all along.

About tea.

If she’s deceived me about – of all things – tea, how can I ever trust her again? How can I be sure that she likes fish, as she claims?

And if tea and fish are in doubt… well, frankly, what’s left?

My chum Ben points me to this wonderful court report from the Guardian about a bogus heiress who claimed to have two million tonnes of gold stashed in caves, which she claimed was worth $300×10⁴¹.

The key line, as Ben notes, is:

“Financial consultant Richard Bedard, who had handed her £127,000 to pay for “legal things”, insisted he still believed in her.”

This is key not because:

“He claimed a CIA agent had assured him the money really existed.”

No. That’s just gullible. We could all fall for that.

It’s key because he apparently believes she has $4.6×10³³ per person on the planet.

‘Financial consultant.’

Dear heavens.

Wait a second – the Guardian have a photo retrospective of Carol Vorderman’s career, and it doesn’t include anything from How2? For shame!