Don't Have a Cow, Man

This week the Advertising Standards Authority gave a ruling on complaints against an advertisement for purveyor of processed meat products Burger King. I haven't seen the advert in question, but apparently it "showed a man singing in a field singing '1.99er. They're only 1.99'. Towards the end of the ad a cow walked past in the background wearing a blanket with the Burger King logo." There were a few variations on the complaint but one main point was that "it was offensive to show a live cow in an ad for Burger King, who sold beef products."

The complaints were not upheld, but the ASA noted that "viewers, including meat eaters, would not necessarily want to be reminded where meat products came from."

Now, it's time for me to get into rant mode, if you'll excuse me...

Why the bloody hell is it so offensive to know where meat comes from? Animals are reared and slaughtered for our consumption, and that includes cattle, those adorable little chicks, and sweet fluffy baa-lambs. That's how we get beefburgers, chicken nuggets and shepherd's pie. We all need to know that we are the cause of death on a vast scale and make a decision. If we can't live with that then we should be vegetarian (or, more appropriately, vegan). Otherwise, we should decide what level of "inconvenience" is acceptable for livestock and make our purchases accordingly.

Personally, I am comfortable with eating meat, but have concerns about the welfare of foodstock, so try to buy meat from sources where I know high standards are maintained. In most cases this now means buying from local sources which avoid intensive rearing practices.

Make your choice, but don't pretend that meat comes from anywhere other than dead animals.

Apologies for going off on one there. The whole BK ad ruling (and others) can be read here (PDF document, so Adobe Reader or other PDF reading software is required).

Artifinished Intellistuff

The waiting is over for this year... I checked my student page on the OU to find this year's course result. It's not as good as most of my previous results, but given how tough I found this course, I am very happy. I can relax now and get ready for the next course to start in January. Tonight deserves a celebratory jug of ale, methinks.

Fungi to be With

This weekend was good. It was the annual "trifle party" hosted by V&K in Cardiff, which is a great opportunity for a group of friends to meet up (many of us don't see each other very often) and eat, drink and be merry. This year we hunted werewolves and discussed the nature of organic salt (wishing that one of us was a chemist).

On our return home I discovered an early Xmas present had arrived from the father-in-law: a baby hazel tree with roots infected with truffle. This is fantastic and a really cool idea for a present. You never know: in a few years we may have truffles growing in our own garden (time to consider buying a pig!).

Despite all of this cool stuff (and more), the best bit of the weekend was meeting up with an old school friend who I haven't seen since 1988, but I have been in intermittent contact with for the last couple of years thanks to Friends Reunited (hey, it works sometimes). We wandered around town and sat and drank coffee and talked for a couple of hours. A lot has happened for both of us and it is great to get some catching up done. We're hoping to get together with a couple more of the lads in the new year.

ePolitico

Something I had almost forgotten about. Last time I used writetothem.com to contact my MP I was encouraged to sign up for a new service whereby you can express an interest in hearing about what your MP is up to and when 25 people have done so within a constituency, the MP would be notified and asked to send something which would be mailed to all the signatories. The notification would be repeated as more people sign up (to a maximum of once per week to hopefully avoid too much annoyance).

Well, yesterday I received an email from hearfromyourmp.com saying that my MP had responded to the sign-ups. Following the link, I found that he had put up a kind of straw poll on ID cards and detention of terrorist suspects, and the site had set up a forum for discussion. I get the impression my MP, Ed Vaizey is rather keen to use this sort of facility to keep in touch — or at least keep up appearances. Fair play to the man.

What interests me most is the growing set of online tools to help us engage in the UK's political process, even in a small way. This can only be a good thing, and long may it continue...

Wannahave

It happens every year and I always feel rather uncomfortable about it, but various family members and friends ask what I want for Xmas. For some reason they don't seem satisfied by the stock answers of "world peace" or "my two front teeth", so after some nudging by <3 I've put up a web page with a few ideas on it. Yes, it includes socks. No, I'm not being facetious — there are few items of clothing as fine as a good pair of woolly socks. <3 made me a pair a few weeks ago and they are fantastic — wearing them now as it happens.

Of course, in lieu of a present, I would be more than happy to receive pledges to make someone laugh, or at least smile. Ideally this should be inflicted on a perfect stranger. There you are, your mission for the winter: make a perfect stranger grin like a loon for at least a few minutes. Normal service will be resumed with the next post...

Trees, Cookies and Roast Pork

We returned home on Friday to find a "missed you" card from TNT. A quick phonecall and the consignment was delivered the next day (very good of them to deliver on a Saturday) and inside was... our hedge! 52 young trees, most of which were no more than whips, but all looking in good condition. A few hours' work over the weekend and we now have what looks like a row of sticks shoved in the ground next to our fence. All we can do now is wait and hopefully, the spring will see a load of new greenage marking the edge of our garden.

While I was digging, <3 was hard at work baking -- and I did a little myself in between hedge planting stints. Between us we now have a sizeable portion of what <3 describes as the EU Cookie Mountain: fudge, choc chip cookies, gingerbread, parkin, cinnamon and almond blobs, biscotti, figs in marzipan and shortbread. Very large quantities of everything, largely for distribution to friends and family over the next couple of weeks.

The culinary icing was put on the metaphorical cake with a roast Sunday lunch based around a piece of pork shoulder from the local Dews Meadow Farm, which produces some excellent pork (and related products). I think this was probably the best roast I have every cooked -- everything came out just right. We are rapidly becoming more and more convinced by the wisdom of buying our meat from local producers who use non-intensive farming methods. Aside from ethical issues regarding the treatment of animals, and the desire to reduce "food miles", this joint did not cost much more than something similar would have cost in a supermarket and tasted so much better.

Who Cann?

The Internet is a massive, distributed network comprising many smaller networks. Much of it is, however, ruled over by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which, as its title suggests, is responsible for allocating top level domain names and IP addresses (those "dotted quads" like 66.249.87.104), which amounts to a phenomenal amount of power. ICANN happens to be a USian organisation. Whether they do a good job or not and if they should be doing it at all has been a matter of debate since they were first established (in 1998).

Recently an international debate has taken place and it has been decided to let sleeping Quangos lie and leave ICANN holding the bag of numbers, despite proposals from the EU and others to form an international regulatory body. There will be a toothless international talking shop to discuss Internet strategy, etc., but that's about it by the looks of it.

What is quite interesting is that a letter from US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has become publically available arguing why the US should be allowed to keep control of the Internet. Condy says, "The success of the Internet lies in its inherently decentralized nature, with the most significant growth taking place at the outer edges of the network through innovative new applications and services. Burdensome, bureaucratic oversight is out of place in an Internet structure that has worked so well for many around the globe." Now, I realise that what she is arguing is that there shouldn't be an intergovernmental bureaucracy to run the Internet as it would inevitably be slow and heavy, but it amuses me that she believes that to take advantage of the Internet's decentralised nature it should be run by a single, USian body. Go figure.

The Day of the Breakfast

On Saturday <3 and I drove the 200 miles to a little village on the Pembrokeshire coast to take part in a Lord of the Rings themed banquet comprising three returns (or breakfasts as they had become labelled) of three courses plus a subtlety. That's an aweful lot of food, folks -- and it was fantastic, washed down with plenty of ale and mead. Under normal circumstances I would be raving on about how tender and tasty the venison was (which it was), but this time the cooks outclassed themselves with the "bear" (or rather beef cooked like bear -- a C14th recipe which apparently makes a beef joint taste rather more ferocious -- and boy was it good!).

The banquet was graced with a number of hobbits (one of whom had brought a to-scale pint tankard which, we later discovered, held three pints!), a ringwraith, the ghost of Boromir, a few returning entwives, and various other personages both mentioned and unmentioned in the books.

The two of us provided some of the entertainment with (between us) songs, dancing, juggling, clowning, and interactive stuff which didn't require a red button at all. That was fun too.

[Thanks to Nicky for the photo.]

Regency

When <3 and I moved to Wantage earlier this year there was a small cinema, hidden above some shops, accessed through an unassuming doorway in the corner of the market square. The cinema had two screens, was a bit tatty and run down, and didn't sell tickets in advance. However, it was cheaper than most other cinemas, showed most of the films we wanted to see and had a certain charm and individuality. For the last few years (while we were living in the next town along to the East) we used this cinema as our main movie-going destination. This was even better when we moved to within walking distance.

This summer, the cinema closed down. This had been on the cards for some time, with falling attendance and increasing competition from bigger chain cinemas within a 30-minute drive. It was not unexpected, but it was sad.

A couple of evenings ago there was a public meeting at the civic centre, with all and sundry invited to discuss the possible ways to get a cinema back in the community. I went along.

The meeting was being held in a reasonable sized room which was already half full when I arrived. More people arrived and when the numbers passed 100, with many more queuing outside, we were moved upstairs to the main hall. By the time the meeting began, that hall was also full -- I estimate over 300 people in all, of all ages and from all sectors of the community. Clearly there was a lot of feeling in the town about this -- apparently this was a bigger turnout than the "Save The Hospital" meeting had received!

After a number of people had had their say, one of the town councillors in attendance encouraged a committee to be formed, with the intention of handing all future action and discussion to them. A good number of people volunteered and a chair was selected: a woman who had already been working hard to build up support for a community cinema of some sort. Unfortunately, from there on things kind of dissolved. There seemed to be numerous ad hoc subcommittees of friends who had the whole situation solved in their minds and were busy deciding how they would proceed with marketing, etc. Meanwhile voices from the floor kept making points, unlistened to by the new committee, who were otherwise engaged.

What this situation needs is strong leadership: someone who can hold a varied group of people together, get their ideas out and discussed then help the committee make some decisions without alienating half of its members. I'm hoping the chairwoman can provide this leadership, but only time will tell. I volunteered to help on the committee and left my contact details, then went home to save my own sanity. I really home a committee meeting is organised: I will attend if at all possible and will do what I can to aid the cause, but it is important to decide what the cause actually is. At the moment there is no such focus.

Heat

On Friday, a Bradford policewoman was shot and killed, and another wounded, while attending a robbery taking place in a travel agent's shop. Since then the media hasbeen buzzing with calls for the police to be allowed to carry firearms as a matter of course.

In July, a young Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was shot and killed by police in what looks like a massive error of judgement by the firearms officers responsible. In the weeks following the incident, the media was buzzing for controls on police use of firearms and decrying the "shoot to kill" policy allegedly in place.

I have struggled to come up with solid references, but I have heard it suggested a number of times that police injured in firearms incidents are very often injured by their own weapon.

If police officers always carry firearms then the number of incidents where there are guns present will increase from the current low level in the UK to near 100% of those attended by police. I think we can postulate a number of rules here...

• Where there are no guns, nobody will get shot.
• If the good guys have guns, someone might get shot, and that someone might be a criminal, a police officer or an innocent 3rd party (the last two due to an accident or the theft of a gun).
• If the bad guys have guns, someone might get shot, and that someone might be a criminal, a police officer or an innocent 3rd party.
• If both the police and the criminals have guns, the chances of someone getting shot will certainly increase.
• If all police carry firearms, there will be an increased chance of someone like Menezes being mistakenly shot.

Furthermore...

• The UK does not employ capital punishment (although there is currently some talk of the death penalty for "cop killers") and opposes it in other countries (though rather weakly in the case of the USA).
• The UK believes in the court system and the doctrine of "innocent until proven guilty" — even if someone has a smoking gun in their hand and a corpse at their feet, they must be tried. This is important. Our "killer" may have (foolishly) picked up the gun of a suicide, be acting inself defence (though possibly using undue force) or, indeed, be a cold-blooded murderer.
• The police are there to protect the public.

Regardless of the other points, this last point is probably the most important. It may be used as justification for providing the police with guns and other new powers. It can also be used as the basis of some cold, heartless number crunching...

IF
    the number of people killed if the police all have guns
IS GREATER THAN
    the number of people killed if the police do not all have guns
THEN
    giving guns to all the police does not protect the public

I suspect that conclusion will, for the next few years at least, be true. And personally, I feel a whole lot safer if the bobbies I see around the place are not packing heat — it tells me that they are not planning to get into a firefight, and that reassures me.

Charge Cards

I am pleased to say that the Home Office have replied to me again, this time putting the text of the reply inside the body of a plain text email — someone showing good sense there. This was from a member of the "ID Cards Programme Team" who gave an interesting response which was very close to what has been released to the media. No problem with that, I hadn't expected a detailed, personal response. I'm actually just happy to get a decent reply.

The crux of the matter is that the government have commissioned an organisation called KPMG (whose objectives, according to their website are "to turn knowledge into value for the benefit of our clients, our people and our capital markets" ... huh?) to conduct an independent study into the costing of the ID card scheme. The results are, funnily enough, that the government has got its figures right and everything is going to be peachy.

The costs being bandied about here are currently an annual amount of £584m for issuing passports and ID cards to UK nationals. That means that if every man, woman and child in the country renews their passport/ID card every 10 years it will cost them in the region of £100 each time, and as there is nothing like a 100% takeup of passports at the moment (it's about 77%) there is no reason to believe that will change, leaving something of a hole in the budgeting. The government is currently saying that the full passport/ID card will be £90, which pretty much tallies with that, but also that there will be a £30 ID card. If there is a serious take-up of the cheaper card (which may well be compulsory), will the cost of administration costs come down or will the missing money be found elsewhere?

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced by the current figures. It reminds me of one of those "independent" studies launched by major software companies which prove that their products are definitely cheaper than free ones. Let's just sit back and watch the numbers increase over the next year or two. Or even better, not sit back at all.

28 Days, Earlier

So, the unthinkable has happened and a government bill, personally endorsed, sponsored and indeed pushed by Tony Blair, has seen one of its provisions defeated by a majority 0f 31, despite a government majority in the Commons of 66 MPs and the recall of Gordon Brown and Jack Straw from missions overseas. Blair says that the police claim 90 days of detention without charge is necessary to deal with the Terrorist Threat (TM) and that anyone who argues otherwise is ignoring the advice of the people who know best and gambling with the lives of the entire country. Parliament, however, has a responsibility to consider more than one angle and weight up the advice, concerns and best interests of everyone, not just the police, and decide accordingly. And yesterday, they did just that.

I'm not entirely convinced about the compromise amendment proposing 28 day detention, which was eventually accepted, was right either, but I do feel that in this case Parliament has done its job and prevented the government simply having its way without question.

Of course, as Blair personally staked so much on this bill, there are a lot of questions being raised about the strength of his leadership. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Unattached

A short while ago I emailed the Home Office with an enquiry about the National ID Card scheme only to have my message bounced as undeliverable. Well, it seems that they did receive my message after all, for today I received a reply...

Thank you for your e-mail enquiry of 18 October 2005.
A reply is attached.

<Standard disclaimer thingy snipped>

begin 666 ResponseT37499 5.doc^M
MT,\1X*&Q&N$`````````````````````/@`#`/[_"0`&```````````````"
M````& ``````````$ ``(@````$```#^____`````!<```" ````________
M____________________________________________________________
M____________________________________________________________
M____________________________________________________________

<Loads more encoded stuff deleted -- you get the general idea>

Clearly they have written a reply in MS Word, tried to attach the file (why, oh why, can't people simply write an email rather than sending around documents in a proprietory and inefficient format?) and failed horribly somehow. The client I used to read this mail, by the way, was GMail, which I haven't previously experienced having trouble with attachments.

I've tried various tricks to access the file, including running uudecode over the file, but no joy. So I have replied to the reply, requesting the respondent reposts the relevent response (!). We'll see what happens. Watch this space...

Runcible

At the weekend we had a visit from my two sisters and the two offspring of one of them -- always great to see them, especially as the nephew is now well into that comical and entertaining stage of toddlerhood. Very cute.

Sis1 brought with her a tray of quinces as part of a deal whereby she gives me the fruit and some time next year I give her a couple of bottles of quince wine.

So on Sunday I spent a while grating and boiling quince, then last night the part-fermented juice got transferred to a demijohn and put in the cupboard. This morning I remembered that it is generally a good idea to make sure that a demijohn is not completely full for the first few days, and found a fair bit of froth around the place. D'oh! Ah, no damage done and not much liquor lost.

Oh No, Not Again

Hmm, it's 11 months since I noted last time, but it seems that yesterday saw this year's Blunket Season end in another kill.

So, same again next Autumn, then?

The most effectual TopSat

This morning I got up early and was in work before 07:00 (what's the 'oh' stand for?...) to attend the TopSat launch event. This is a satellite that people here helped build -- more specifically, people in our department build a camera capable of a resolution of 2.8m from aheight of about 680km, which is pretty impressive given that the project cost just $22M, a fraction of the cost of most satellites with a similar function (taking photos of the earth).

Happily the launch went smoothly so the UK now has a brand new flying digital camera in space.

Oh, and we didn't launch it ourselves -- after a few presentations on the project we watched a live feed from the launch site at Plesetsk in Russia, where it was launched, alongside four other satellites, on a Kosmos 3M liquid fueled vehicle.

No Place Like the Home Office

Yesterday to celebrate the movement of the ID card bill through its third reading (a piece of important news, cleverly arranged to be overshadowed by Ken Clark) I emailed the Home Office through the address advertised on their website for general enquiries (public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk), thinking that there was no chance they would offer a straight answer to how much the ID card scheme would cost (current estimates vary from about £3 billion to over £20 billion -- that's American-style billions, by the way), but I might as well ask anyway.

Today I received my response, which wasn't quite what I had expected...

Your message

 To:      public.enquiries@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
 Subject: ID Card Query
 Sent:    Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:54:20 +0100

did not reach the following recipient(s):

Public Enquiries (CD) on Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:44:20 +0100
   The recipient was unavailable to take delivery of the message
       The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=gb;a=cwmail;p=home
office;l=SDCEMB010510190844SAAKW16R
   MSEXCH:MSExchangeMTA:PHU:L01EM004

Hmm, if their IT infrastructure can't handle a simple email enquiry, what hope is there for the national identity register? Or maybe there is another explanation...

Crimes Against Music

Yesterday evening we went to see Mitch Benn at New Greenham Arts, on the site of the former Greenham Common airbase. Most of our friends have never heard of Mitch (they don't listen to Radio 4 as habitually as we do), so trying to describe him to them can be difficult -- I've settled on him being something of a cross between Bill Bailey, Weird Al Yankowic and Tom Lehrer, but definitely with his own style. Basically, he does cleverly written and (with the help of his talented backing musicians, The Distractions) wonderfully executed musical humour.

The show was great, with my personal highlights being "Ikea" (about the vikings who are "conquering the world with our self-assembly, flat-packed furniture"), "Now He's Gone" (a touching song about a girl who has a novel solution to ensuring that her boyfriend never fools around) and the spectacular "Macbeth (my name is)" (an Eminem style rap about the classic antihero who is told, "by man born of woman your butt is unkickable"). Oh and there was the one about the teaparty. And the stadium rock. And the West End musical. And...

Mitch and the band seemed quite fun in general: bassist, keyboardist and vocalist Kirsty turned up outside during the interval for a swift cigarette and a chat with those assembled, and there was a good opportunity to meet them (and buy albums) afterwards where we learned that it is easy to set Mitch off on one of his rants.

We'll be keeping an eye on his tourdates in future...

Long-Term Hedge

One edge of our garden is shared with neighbours and has a combination of 6' wooden fence and short sections of hedge (leylandii -- erk!). The other two sides, one of which borders a road which sees quite a lot of traffic, are bounded by a waist-high wire fence.

It feels quite exposed, so we want to do something about it. I like the idea of a hardwood hedge, but that would need quite a lot of trees/shrubs and I have so far been unable to find the right sort of plants at a price we can afford.

Until now.

Enter a Somerset firm called Ashridge Trees who can provide industrial (or should that be agricultural) quantities of young trees from an alarming selection of species for what looks to me like great prices. I expect we'll be ordering a few dozen trees this year. The only problem is that it will take a few years for the hedge to turn into a hedge, but it means we can be surrounded by things like blackthorn, crab apple and wild roses. Nice...

Freedom and Wealth

Paul Graham, in his essay 'The Word Hacker' asserts "If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite trend." I thought I'd test this, so had a quick look around the CIA World Factbook to get some data.

This was completely non-scientific, just pulling info on a few countries more or less at random, but is vaguely interesting.

Country	GDP per capita ($)	Gratuitous graphic bit
USA	40100
Switzerland	33800
Ireland	31900
Canada	31500
Australia	30700
UK	29600
Netherlands	29500
Japan	29400
France	28700
Germany	28700
Sweden	28400
Spain	23300
New Zealand	23200
South Korea	19200
Saudi Arabia	12000
South Africa	11100
Russia	9800
Iran	7700
Romania	7700
Turkey	7400
Venezuela	5800
China	5600
Egypt	4200
India	3100
Cuba	3000
Pakistan	2200
North Korea	1700
Uganda	1500
Nigeria	1000
Somalia	600

A couple of countries I tried to access resulted in "access forbidden": Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. I didn't spend too much effort looking for others.

While all this proves absolutely nothing, there are a few interesting things to be seen like, for example, that South Korea has more that 10 times the per capita GDP than North Korea, or that Ireland does better than most of Europe. Actually, I am mildly surprised to see the USA so far in front too.

Near Miss

Today I received an email from a family member pointing me at a website purporting to allow visitors to find out about "near misses" registered on their car by speed cameras, explaining that if you reach 20 near misses you receive a speeding ticket.

Well, a whois search on the domain reveals that the owner of the site is one "Snooty Fox Leisure" (which doesn't sound like the sort of organisation that would have access to this sort of information), and viewing the page source reveals that the first line of the page is a comment reading "This is a fake program that is not intended to harm anyone (c) Paul Suggitt 2003".

I guess this isn't genuine.

2005-09-26 Update: I've had another look at the site and played with it -- it gives you pregenerated usernames and passwords, and doesn't actually do anything else (the site pretends that the service is unavailable). I wonder how many people keep going back there to try to check their car.

2005-09-27 Another update: OK, it does work (the service unavailable was genuine), and it seems safe. I still don't approve for numerous reasons. Yeah, I'm a sour-puss and grumpy-face.

Artificially Intelligible

It is finally over! This year has been the toughest I have had yet with the Open University and this lunchtime I posted my end of course project report.

The course has been on artificial intelligence and, on balance, it has been interesting and enjoyable. The problem is that part of the course made use of software that I found... uhhh... unpleasant to use, to say the least. By the sounds of it I was not alone in this. The software is a KBS (knowledge-based system) toolkit called Flex, which tries so hard to be user friendly but falls so far short. And the less said about the documentation, the better.

Anyway, the end-of-course projectlet required some experimentation with this toolkit... and hilarity ensued.

Now it's the 3-month wait for the results to come out, then two more years of study (next year its a whole year of project work, designing and building a networked application in Java) and I will finally have that degree. Almost there now...

But tonight, I will have a beer.

Flight Club

Saturday saw the wedding of VK and KG, the first church wedding I have been to for some four years, although come to think of it a little over two years ago there was another religious wedding which, thanks to an allowance in Scottish laws, was held outside.

Many of our friends have had quirky weddings in one way or another and this was no exception: the reception was effectively a small kite festival with invited guests only. There was a hog roast, an ice cream van, and flying demonstrations from some of the best kite flyers in the UK -- including the reigning UK individuals champion. The bride and groom's "first dance" was a performance of their kite ballet to the tune of "Me and My Shadow", which after a couple of false starts due to far too little wind, they did an admirable job of.

I really must fly kites more often.

Reichenbach

A month and a half ago, <3 and I handed back to the keys to our previous house. We wanted to do this much earlier but the landlord refused to let us out of our contract.

We walked around the house and the landlord pointed out numerous points where he felt we had damaged his house or failed to leave it in a fit and clean state. Apart from a couple of points we disagreed with his assessment, but managed to not get too angry with his nitpicking and hectoring. We also kept quiet about his frankly insulting comments -- for instance the comment about how now <3 has a PhD (in physics and electrical engineering) she can get out of the typing pool.

After some discussion it was agreed that we would pay for certain repairs out of our deposit (of nearly £1000) and an additional £100 for time spent to clean everything up (we hoped this would ease the transition). This would leave us with at least half of our deposit to be repaired.

Two weeks ago, <3 phoned the landlord (who was unavailable) and left a message asking if any progress had been made with returning our deposit.

A little over a week ago we received a letter from the landlord in his usual hectoring tone, listing a large number of defects and reasons for keeping the deposit -- all of it. He provided receipts for less than £70.

Two days later we saw a solicitor for legal advice. He suggested that we probably have a good case and that if the landlord cannot produce receipts for money he deducts from the deposit, a court would be likely to side with us if in any doubt. The solicitor also explained the procedure in some detail for seeking a county court judgement in order to reclaim our money.

Yesterday we posted a letter to the landlord, 'without prejudice', disputing some of his comments, inviting him to reconsider his decision to keep the deposit, and threatening legal action.

Interestingly, the house is currently for sale and, according to the estate agent, there has been plenty of interest. I'm wondering if the landlord will have the "necessary" repairs done (I doubt he ever intended this) before it sells. If not, he won't ever have those receipts.

Gorging Ourselves

Saturday was KG's stag day and the main event was an afternoon of "gorge scrambling" courtesy of Adventures in Kenfig, near Porthcawl. I have to admit to a measure of trepidation (as did many of the other guys), but went along, paid my money and was duly issued with a wetsuit, buoyancy aid and helmet.

Half an hour or so of driving around South Wales brought us to Pontneddfechan, towards the western end of the Brecons, we got our kit on and set off with two instructors and three people who had arrived as a separate group. Shortly afterwards we were floating down a stretch of river before beginning the scramble up a tributary.

Despite initial misgivings, this was fun. Over the next three hours we traversed rocks and walls, climbed waterfalls, swam pools, crawled through caves, yelled encouragement to each other and finally rounded things off with leaps from a couple of waterfalls, all in beautiful surroundings. All tiring (and 4 days later I'm still acheing) but enjoyable and rewarding. Plus, it's entirely possible we might do it again sometime -- even <3 and some of the other non-attendees sound like they might be up for joining us.

As the evening shadows fall

On Tuesday, <3 and I returned from a week in Ireland with the inlaws, during which we were taken for a few days among the mountains and coastlines of County Donegal. I was definitely bitten by the breathtaking beauty of the area (not to mention the midges) and hope to return and spend a more leisurely time smelling the proverbial coffee.

One day's excursion, however, took us across the border to Northern Ireland, where we visited the Giant's Causeway (a spectacular place to simply sit and watch the sea) and the Bushmills distillery (with its fine guided tours and whiskey sampling). On the way back, the F-in-L took us for a walk around the city of (London)Derry.

According to F-in-L, the city is historically more correctly simply Derry, but the county could be correctly referred to as Londonderry, but he believes this is less of a sectarian issue than I had assumed. Our walk around the city included the still-intact walls, still containing watch towers left over from the euphemistically named "troubles". Just outside the walls lies the Fountain, a run-down loyalist area decorated with union flags and red, white and blue painted curbstones. Visible from the walls was a well-painted graffito, reading "LONDONDERRY WEST BANK LOYALISTS STILL UNDER SIEGE NO SURRENDER".

On the other side of the city centre lies the republican Bogside, where the gable end of a bombed out building has been tidied up and painted with the slogan, "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY". This is the area where the Bloody Sunday shootings took place in 1972 and many of the beautifully painted murals on the houses in the area commemorate this and other incidents from the conflict through the 70's and 80's.

It is clear that there is still a lot of anger and hate remaining in Derry, a city sorely in need of reconciliation. But there is hope. One of the houses in Bogside is decorated with a mural showing a rainbow coloured chequer pattern, across which is flying a stylised white dove. That, above all else that I saw, makes me think that perhaps peace is on its way.

Twoiversary

Two years ago today I married <3. Life is good.

MP and ID

A week and a half ago I made use of WriteToThem.com to contact my MP, Ed Vaizey regarding my opposition to the government's identity card legislation currently going through parliament. To sum up: it's too expensive; the technology is not reliable enough; given the past record of large, public IT projects it will be massively over budget, very late and fail to deliver core functionality; it won't have any significant effect on benefits fraud, terrorism, etc. (in fact, it may make life easier for terrorists and organised criminals, who now have only one document to forge or otherwise work around), and there are massive civil liberties concerns. Vaizey already opposes the ID card bill on similar grounds, but I figured it was worth giving him some support in this.

I was pleased to receive a short email from Mr. Vaizey the next day, pledging to continue to oppose the bill and drawing my attention to a letter (which he had written) on the subject in that week's local paper.

I was even more pleased when Saturday's post brought me a proper letter, thanking me for my thoughts, talking about his position on ID cards and enclosing a copy of Hansard for the day of the ID Card Bill's second reading debate. Not bad.

Bastards

I was in a meeting in Cambridge yesterday when I heard. We had travelled by train, via London, to the meeting, so there was no chance of returning home by the same route. However, as is usual in such situations, people pull together and sort things out -- another group at the meeting had come by minibus and had enough spaces to give our group a lift for most of the distance. Many others were not so lucky. I am still awaiting news of a colleague who left the meeting early, and would have been due to reach London shortly after the explosions. His journey was probably not a good one.

Local Veg For Local People

Yesterday, <3 and I had the lowest food-mile meal we have had for a very long time (possibly ever) -- home grown spuds, carrots and courgettes, and chops from a farm about 5 miles down the road. The only bits of the main course that had come from further afield were the salt and pepper, and a knob of butter. Well chuffed.

Soft Fruit

Last night <3 and I had raspberries from our own garden. There were only enough for three each, and they were somewhat on the small side, but beautifully ripened by the recent sun and possibly the best raspberries I've had -- though that is obviously coloured by the romance of being home grown and shared with the one I love.

Desperately Seeking Cosmos

It's great when something interesting and innovative gets done, and the launch of Cosmos 1 yesterday fit that profile, in spades, being a solar sail powered spacecraft, launched from a Russian submarine in a converted ICBM. Neat. The problem was that something went wrong, and control lost contact with the craft shortly after launch.

Signals have since been picked up from the craft, but they are weak -- it sounds like Cosmos 1 is in orbit, but the wrong orbit, and the search is on to find it and see if the mission can be rescued. There's a BBC story, and the latest news can be had from the official Cosmos 1 blog.

Biological Warfare

We have a pair of young apple trees in our garden, planted by way of celebration the day after we received the keys to the house. I've wanted my own orchard for years, so this seemed a perfect time to do something about one of my ambitions.

So a few months later, we have baby apples growing and one of the trees had started to develop a bit of a blackfly problem. For the last week or so I have been doing battle with a spritzer full of washing up water, which is meant to be useful in such cases, though I have a feeling that our dolphin friendly, ozone-hole-repairing washing-up liquid might be a bit too mellow and herbal to do the job.

Anyway, yesterday evening I counted no less than five ladybirds on this tiny tree, happily chowing down on aphids. I think from here on I'll lay off on the detergent and let the predators do their thing. Go team!

Nine Go Mad In Wiltshire

For something like 20 years public access to Stonehenge, one of Britains most famous ancient monuments, has been severely restricted due to fears of erosion, vandalism, and the possibility that someone might accidentally discover its true purpose and open a portal to another dimension and allow Unspeakable Horrors (TM) to conquer Wiltshire. Some more enlightened souls believe this may have already happened. Anyway, public access is now limited to being able to wander around a footpath a respectful distance from the stones themselves and visits by appointment only for restricted numbers of people at dawn and dusk, which do in fact allow you full access (but no climbing). Permission to conduct rituals, play drums, or dance naked are by special arrangement only.

A friend had arranged for a group of us to go to the dawn session yesterday. Of course, this being June, dawn was somewhat early and we left home shortly after three in order to allow plenty of time for the trip.

The whole trip was, I think, well worthwhile although unfortunately the sky was fairly cloudy and a thick fog had set in and shrouded Salisbury Plain so that the horizon could not be seen. Hence no dawn could really be seen. Pity.

I would be remiss, however, if I failed to confess to my own little part in the procedings when I saw a glimmer of light emerging over the brow of a fog-blurred hill. I was looking at the light for some time before concluding that it was not, in fact, the sun: the actual horizon (initially hidden by the fog) was somewhat higher than the light, the light did not change in size or position, and a quick reality check revealed that the light was actually in the carpark and not anywhere near the "heel stone", which actually marks the point of sunrise as viewed from the centre of the stones at the summer solstice.

Ho hum.

Rhubarb Rhubarb!

I got into a little bit of trouble the other day when <3 arrived home with a big bag full of rhubarb, kindly provided by some friends who are having a bit of a glut at the moment. Based on the conveniently appropriate quantity of said vegetable and the news that "there's more where that came from" I used it up as the basis for a batch of wine.

Of course, <3 had in mind a rhubarb crumble with custard, so I got a bit of a stern look when she returned home.

Luckily, a couple of days later, my sister and her family came visiting, bearing their own rhubarb, so the crumble was a possibility once more -- and very nice it was too. Now I'm looking forward to the wine, though that'll take a few months before it is ready. Our own rhubarb crop is starting to look reasonably healthy too, though we don't want to crop it too heavily this year as it is still a very young plant.

Exterminate!

Every desk should have a "buddy", a friendly being that resides there and who will listen to the main occupant's inane witterings without finding fault or falling asleep. It helps when debugging code, for instance, to have someone/thing to explain things to. Luckily I now have such a desk buddy, thanks to <3 who got all creative following an episode of Doctor Who...

It's That Time of Year

Happy Star Wars Day!

Hitch Who?

The bank holiday weekend turned out to be nice and productive, with a decent amount of gardening done, some good progress on my next assignment (using an AI package to simulate robots on a packaging production line) and some bits of culture. Sort of.

Saturday saw the return of the Daleks to Doctor Who. Or rather, a Dalek. I've heard plenty of people moaning about how much of a letdown this Dalek was, but I really enjoyed the story -- pathos, redemption and a display of awesome destructive power. Good storytelling from where I was sitting.

The other major bit of culture was the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which we went to see twice. Well, the first time we watched the Earth being destroyed, closely followed by watching the projector committing suicide. The cinema people apologised profusely and offered refunds, vouchers, or a chance to see the Heffalump Movie instead. We opted for vouchers (this is a small local cinema that is in severe danger and we don't want to lose) and came back the following day, when everything worked fine.

To digress for a moment, on the first visit we had a family sitting behind us, who had all brought along towels which they were wearing on their heads at appropriate times. The following night, they sat next to us (having recognised us) and much silliness ensued.

And the film? Well, again I've heard lots of moaning about how pants it is, how it isn't a patch on "the original" and how Ford shouldn't be American, but once again I'll put my hand up and say how much I enjoyed it. Yes, it's different, but the book, the radio series and the TV series were all very different, despite the latter two having largely the same cast. H2G2 is a movable feast of silliness and for me it worked, even though there was rather more plot in the film than I'm used to. And Ford wasn't British in the "original", he was from Betelgeuse.

Silver Bells and Cockle Shells

This gardening thing is getting to be addictive. The apple trees are budding and looking ready to produce a better than expected display of blossom. The lettuces are rapidly approaching "baby leaf" status. The onions and carrots have been steadily growing. My first leek has just poked a sprout above the level of the compost in its seed tray. We now have a few donated raspberry canes growing away in the corner of the garden. And -- most exciting to my mind -- three of our nine potato plants have managed to get sprouts above ground.

It's all good. Now I have to prepare myself for the inevitable battles with slugs and caterpillars...

Getting back on the horse

The longer I leave this, the more happens, so it's about time to bite the bullet, grab the bull by the horns and put the pedal to the metal. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

ITEM. The inlaws (ma, pa and bro) came to stay for a long weekend over Easter. Not a bad weekend, all told, and it was nice to be away from work for almost a week.

ITEM. On the first night of the visit the water stopped flowing, signalling our first crisis in the new house. Luckily pa-inlaw has experience with plumbing and to cut a long story short, much of the weekend was spent replacing the header tank in the loft which, after some 50 years of sterling service, appeared to be held together by a combination of rust and limescale.

ITEM. About a bottle and a half of the rosehip wine has now been drunk and another bottle presented to the guy who first persuaded me to try homebrewing and gave me my first couple of demijohns. While it isn't exactly Chateau Lafitte, I reckon it's a well drinkable drop of plonk, and as the first wine I finished (not counting the abortive port 10 years back and the apple wine made at school -- but that's another story), I'm taking it as great encouragement.

ITEM. A couple of weeks back, my gallon of mead remained cloudy. After coming back from a local shop with the better part of a kilo of black bananas (which cost 10p), I tried out a trick from CJJ Berry, which involves boiling up black bananas with water and using the juice as finings. A few days later and what do you know? -- the mead was almost crystal clear! Life is good.

ITEM. The latest bit of obsession is gardening for food. Having dug up large chunks of the garden, I have planted carrots, onions, lettuces and potatos, with leaks and cabbages to join them soon. In addition, we have a couple of apple trees (planted the day after we bought the house), rhubarb and a gooseberry bush plus assorted herbs around the place. Now we just have to keep weeds and pests clear, and trust to the climate.

Just When We Thought It Was Safe...

So there we were, moving towards completion of our house purchase, the contracts signed and a date set, when <3 received a phonecall from our solicitor saying that the bank wasn't happy with the arrangements for our mortgage.

This story goes back to early January, when we met with our Personal Financial Mangler and went through all the paperwork for the mortgage application and the various other things euphemistically described as Financial Products that we were buying (insurance, income protection...). Ms. Mangler set up direct debit mandates for us, filling in the appropriate forms from some plasticwear provided by <3. We signed on the assorted dotted lines, shook hands and went away, somewhat shellshocked.

Since then, we have had a series of letters from various different bank departments, each wanting us to sign a new direct debit mandate as there was, apparently, something wrong with the original forms (which, you will remember, were filled in on our behalf by an officer of the bank).

Here is where I could go off on a rant about large organisations with customer relationship management systems which are so disjointed that each of the company's many tentacles has no idea what the others are up to. I won't. Much.

Now, back to the start of the story, and it turns out that yet more DD mandates are required. <3 extended a lunch break and went to our branch of the bank, handed over completed forms and was assured that everything was now OK.

Come the day of completion, we receive a phonecall from the branch to say that everything was definitely still hunky-dory and the mortgage funds would be drawn down forthwith.

We twiddled our thumbs and drank tea until lunchtime, when the solicitor phoned to let us know that the bank's head office were still refusing to release the funds as they had not received authorisation from the branch -- and he had been unable to reach someone at the branch.

Remember what I was saying about tentacles?

So we tore into town and burst into the bank with fury before us and all hell at our backs (<3 is magnificent when enraged) and demanded to speak to someone in charge (our normal policy of being nice to the poor saps at the first point of contact had, to our shame, gone out of the window). A manager-type woman came to see us and assured us that she had just spoken with head office to authorise the payment and, yes, she would be happy to phone our solicitor to inform him of this.

Shortly thereafter, we had another call from the solicitor to confirm that the mortgage was indeed about to be drawn down, but it would be a few hours before this would be complete. As this would probably delay the completion of the house purchase until the following week, he told us that his firm would pay for the house and reimburse itself from the mortgage funds later in the day.

So, thanks to a solicitor who acted above and beyond the call of duty (and who we will happily recommend to anyone buying a house in the area) and despite shoddy service from the bank (who I doubt we will be buying further "financial services" from), we are now home owners. And thanks to the efforts of many friends over the last couple of weeks, we have decorated a couple of rooms and moved almost all our worldly belongings in.

A brief epilogue:

A couple of days ago we received another letter from the bank requesting a freshly completed direct debit mandate.

Settlings and Upheavals

Well, I've been in the new job for over two weeks now and despite a chaotic start where I had no email and nobody to show/tell me what to do for several days, things are settling down and I am slowly starting to get the hang of some parts of my job. It's a very different job to my last one, where I was out, about and busy among ordinary users, as opposed to my current situation of sitting at a desk, leaping tall filesystems with a single keystroke.

So just as that portion of my life begins to approach some form of normality, another prepares to go mental. In two days time, we complete the purchase of our new house, pick up the keys, and begin the process of moving. It all seems to have gone remarkably smoothly so far, but no doubt chaos will kick in as soon as we get there. We have many volunteers to help with decorating and shifting furniture.

Momentous Times

Just before Christmas, <3 and I decided to start looking for a house of our own, found a strong contender in Wantage, put in an offer and had it accepted. Since then we have applied for a mortgage, engaged a solicitor, and found out from the surveyor that he will recommend to our lender that they approve the mortgage. Scary stuff, but it looks like we should soon own our very own house.

In the last few months of 2004 I had no less than three job interviews in various places. The third one resulted in a job offer on the same day our offer on the house was accepted. Since then I have handed in my notice at my current employer, done assorted paperwork, and arranged a start date for the new employer. The new job is as a "Data Storage Administrator", which involves helping to look after a scientific data storage facility and doing some programming in Python -- a language that I admitted in the interview to not knowing, but which I am currently learning the basics of to give myself a headstart.

Also before Christmas I found out that I had achieved a distinction in my last OU course. This means that, as far as I can make out, all I have to do is pass my remaining three courses to get the best degree classification possible. Yay!

A momentous end to last year.