Mini Meet

I neglected to post a report on the main event of last weekend: MiniMeet, a get-together kindly hosted by E&I in their old farmhouse in the valleys a few miles fromPontypool. The idea was for a bunch of their friends to stay for the weekend, eat, drink, talk and play games, with a break in the middle to cram about 15 people into a small room in order to watch Doctor Who.

The weekend was great, giving me a chance to play one of my all-time favourite boardgames, El Grande, finally have a go at the excellent Carcasonne and its 2-player variant, The Castle, played lots of Are You A Werewolf? (I actually managed to win as a werewolf and survive as a seer one evening) and even did some roleplaying thanks to James and his hysterical "Broken Crane" Feng Shui scenario and <3's Nearside Project game (though the Nearside web page doesn't seem to be working right in my browser).

Anyway, that was a fun weekend and E&I deserve big thanks for organising and hosting it. Hopefully it won't be a one-off.

Roofus Novus, Part 1

Our house is currently shrouded in scaffolding and, as of half an hour ago, only had half a roof. <3 took a picture yesterday evening...

The story is that we have an old prefab house which still has its original asbestos roof. Asbestos cement isn't anything like as nasty as its more often worried about cousins, but it is still unpleasant stuff, doesn't look nice, and is brittle so there is a constant worry that it will develop a big gaping hole in the next gale. <3 and I decided to have it replaced this summer and were in the process of getting quotes when, on Friday morning, a roofing contractor dropped a letter through our door. It turns out that they wanted a couple of filler jobs to do before a big, delayed, contract got started, and they were willing to offer a fairly decent discount for someone wanting the job done right away.

By lunchtime we had a visit from a rep from the company and had found out more. We thought about it over the weekend and confirmed that we wanted the work done (including getting new cladding, which should massively improve the house's insulation) on Monday. Yesterday they put up scaffolding, and as I type they are removing the old roof -- apparently by the end of the day we should have a new felt roof and the proper covering (metal sheets which look like tiles) will be going on over the next few days.

I know how they are proceding at the moment because I had a phonecall earlier to say that they couldn't get any power for their tools, so I had to take a quick trip back to check it out. It turns out that they have a shonky transformer that was tripping our power circuits, and so they'll be getting a new one in. Doesn't bode too well, but other than that they seem to be doing a good job so far.

Open Contentment

There doesn't seem to have been much in the way of fanfares and flashing lights about this, but last month the Open University announced their Open Content Initiative. The idea is that as, over the years, it has made programmes freely available over the TV and radio for anyone to watch or listen to, it will start publishing some of its books and other course materials on the interweb for anyone to read. This sounds great to me: you can get a good source of educational materials for free, or you can pay to get the full tuition and matriculation package. I'm not sure what or how much will be published this way in the near future, but they have £5.65M to spend on the project.

Designed to Provoke an Emotional Response...

A couple of months ago I remember Phillip posted about CAPTCHAs, the technology where you prove that you are really a human by typing in some information from an image, which is theoretically tricky for a computer to do. Well, this morning I spotted a post on Bruce Schneier's blog pointing to a cute variation on the theme: KittenAuth, where you prove you are human by telling the difference between kittens and other fluffy lumps of cuteness like chicks and baby rabbits. Awww...

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Fibs
Words
Poems
New era haikus
A web-based fad, I love this stuff!

Dip Me In Chocolate...

Yesterday evening we took a trip into Oxford to see Jerry Springer The Opera. We saw this a while ago when it was controversially shown on BBC2 and was impressed with its wit, humanity, high quality music, top notch cast and utter disrespect for taboos. The controversy is quieter now, but has not gone away: as we approached we were handed leaflets by the small group of Christian Voice protesters.

The leaflet argued that the show is blasphemous and a vehicle for the writer's "unreasoning hatred of Christianity", going into some detail about the perceived evils of the production before going on to be more positive about the Christian message. The author of the leaflet says that he has seen the show ("and rather wishes he hadn't"), and I don't doubt that to be true, but what I saw didn't strike me as an unreasoning attack on Christianity. I saw some quite intelligent debate on morality and society wrapped up in so many cuss words that you have to either walk out or laugh. It just so happened that the Judeo-Christian stories form much of the cultural background for the writer and most of the intended audience, so made an appropriate setting for the show. Unfortunately in taking such an uncompromising view, the writer created something that would certainly offend many people. Of course, there has never been any secret about this and those who watch and are offended can't say they didn't know what they were in for.

A few miscellaneous points...

• There is a f*** of a lot of swearing.
• Critics of the show say that Jesus is portrayed as a man in a nappy. This is not accurate — he wears a loincloth much as depicted in most images of the crucifixion.
• There are some "cheap shot" gags at the expense of Jesus: "Talk to the stigmata", "Grow up and put some clothes on!", etc...
• The show shows Jerry largely as shallow, self-important and with more concern for his own career than his "victims" (despite protestations to the contrary), but JS has seen the show and has given it his blessing.
• The swearing really is relentless.
• In the midst of the nastiness there is some real humanity and some beautifully drawn, sympathetic characters. The wife of the man who wants to be a baby is one great example. The woman who wants to break out of her trailer trash lifestyle and "just dance" is another, a fine example of true beauty amidst the freak show.
• The descent into hell and the theme of an attempted reconciliation between heaven and hell (which is obviously doomed to fail) is truly epic stuff.
• The music is pretty much all great, and ranges across so many styles. You just don't necessarily want the kids singing those catchy tunes.
• The fact that the entire second half appears to occur within the fevered imagination of a dieing man says quite a lot about the character of that man.
• And finally, how can anyone fully hate a show which has the Ku Klux Klan doing a camp tap dance routine?

Love it or hate it, I reckon this is good art. It made me laugh and think, and that can't be all bad.

OU TM421 06 TMA01 (hut...hut...)

Last night I submitted my first TMA (Tutor Marked Assignment) for this year's course, TM421 The M301 Project. The cryptic course title hides the fact that the aim is to specify, design and implement an application in Java. I figure about the hardest part of this sort of task is to decide what to do in the first place, but I have actually managed to get past that stage: I will be writing a system to manage backups (an online mirror) of files across a network, which has some relevance to what I do at work. This first assignment covered writing up a proposal, drafting a schedule for work, doing some background research and, something which is a major feature of OU project courses, reflecting on the process so far.

The course runs for longer than is usual for OU courses, with the final submission in December, which means it will be February or March before I hear the result. By that time I should be getting in to my final course to complete the degree. It seems like such a long time since I started (January 2001), but at last the finishing line is almost in sight.

What sort of fool decides to study for a degree part time through correspondance courses, anyway?