Heigh-ho, heigh ho...

Sometimes you just have one of those days where you are just so pleased that your job is what it is. For me, yesterday was one of those.

I had been invited, with my departmental health & safety hat on, to visit the underground laboratory at Boulby Mine, on the Cleveland/North Yorkshire border. So, I spent most of Thursday travelling up country, met up for dinner with the staff of the lab and the other couple of visitors that were also making the trip, and then crashed in a local hotel.

The next morning started fairly early so that we could have our safety briefing, get kitted out in lovely orange overalls and the assorted safety gear, and then catch the 08:30 cage ride into the pit. The cage drops about 1000 metres in something approaching 10 minute and is quite an experience being sardined in with 20-odd miners going down to start a shift. Boulby is a working potash mine (with a sideline in rock salt), so the scientists have spent a lot of time and effort building up good working relations with the mine workers.

The whole trip was an incredible learning experience. We were given a thorough tour of the lab area, the good, the bad and the ugly, which was fascinating, but what really astounded me was the mine itself. It's an environment that is so amazingly alien to me and which I had no real concept of what it was like.

We didn't have time to visit the working face (which would have been close to a two hour round trip), but we did get to visit a location where some scientific equipment (a muon detector) was about to be set up. This location was a half hour drive from the shaft! I had heard that there are about 100km of tunnels, but even that hadn't really prepared me for the scale of the mine. Many of these tunnels are full sized roads where two vehicles can easily pass each other (though there are some larger vehicles that find this less easy!). Travel around has to be via trucks, buggies and other diesel-powered vehicles due to the distances involved. Our guide and driver pointed out features like when we were passing under the coastline and began driving beneath the North Sea, or the workshops where the heavy mining equipment is assembled and maintained.

On the way back we were shown a "safe haven", a refuge where in the event of an emergency, workers could shut themselves in and have access to piped or bottled air supplies while they await rescue. Given that the ambient temperature there is around 40 degrees Celsius, you can imagine the discomfort if there are fifty men crammed in there breathing through smoke hoods, with a fire outside and no water supplies inside. Well, you can treat dehydration and heat exhaustion but you can't treat dead.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of this as we weren't allowed to take any electrical kit down. But you'll just have to take my word for it, this was an awesome experience. And I owe great thanks to the team that was looking after us.

Training a Gamer

I've been seriously slack at posting here over the last couple of years, having been distracted largely by other things. Most of my (admittedly very irregular) blogging effort is currently going into Training a Gamer, something of a record of sharing a boardgaming hobby with Miss B. Take a look if you are interested...

Time Travel in Ireland

Wow, it's been an awfully long time since I posted, so I've got a fair bit to catch up on. What first...?

Well, last month we had a week or so in Ireland, mostly to visit family, but with a couple of days to do some exploring and touristing. Places visited included Cahir Castle (a nice castle on a little island in the river), the Rock of Cashel (spectacular ruined cathedral and other buildings on a rocky hill), and the Irish National Heritage Park (a collection of replica buildings representing 9000 years of history).

The Heritage Park was fascinating, and quite light on people, which was both a blessing and a curse. It was one of those places that would be quite at home with a bunch of reenactors wandering about, grinding corn or lathing wood into chair legs. Anyway, the guide leaflet was enough to help us get around with a break for snacks half way, and each group of buildings had a very good introductory sign, explaining the background of the exhibits.

Some of the areas looked fantastic (like the monastery, complete with a painted high cross), but a good many parts were heavily overgrown and looked like more funding was required to get things really looking great. One of these areas in particular was the crannog, a man-made island settlement in use, apparently, until about 400 years ago. The houses were looking very much the worse for wear, walls collapsing under the weight of their roofs. We were just musing on how unfortunate it was that the upkeep of these places wasn't being seen to when <3 spotted a sign we had missed on the way in, which explained things. Apparently the crannog was being deliberately abandoned so that archaeologists could study the decay. The plan was to leave it for a few years, then burn the remains down, doing more excavation, and then reconstructing it anew. It turns out that the way the walls collapsed offered an explanation for how excavated "real" houses of this type showed fireplaces that moved around: the inhabitants would have moved the fire to keep it beneath the shifting smokehole.

As far as Miss B was concerned, the best bit (apart from the ice cream she had) was the viking boatyard which included, critically, a small longboat that she was able to climb onto and run around on, ordering her parents to be the captain and set sail. No, I don't know quite how that works either.

Improving Meetings

Based on a conversation at coffee in which a colleague referenced a Guardian article about how most meetings are a waste of time, I have a plan for improving efficiency in our organisation. Put simply, make provision of coffee and biscuits compulsory at all meetings (and charged to the meeting organiser's project). That's it. I am assuming some sort of internal economy where a catering provider/group charges for the coffees, and not someone just bringing in a packet of Hobnobs -- though it is possible that could work OK too.

I predict the following benefits:

1. The organiser will think twice about whether or not the meeting is actually needed as most budget holders would tend to be pretty anal about not wasting project funds (certainly the case where I work in this time of funding squeezes).
2. The organiser will only invite people who are actually relevant to the meeting, for the same reason.
3. With "free" coffee, the meetings should actually be pretty well attended, avoiding the problem of critical people going AWOL.

I rest my case.

The Adventures of Little Miss Daredevil and the Slide of Doom

We've been really lucky so far with the health of Miss B. She's been ill a few times and required a trip to the local minor injuries unit to get a bump patched up, but until now we've avoided hospital. In fact, we're still very lucky as this first hospitalisation was a relatively minor injury and some very straightforward treatment. Anyway, to the story...

In our garden we have a slide. It's one of those little plastic ones with three steps and is all of two feet tall at its highest point. Miss B loves it, even though she is now rather too big for it. She slides down it happily, even though her feet nearly reach the bottom when she is sitting at the top, and she jumps from the top of the steps for dramatic effect (3-year-olds seem to like jumping).

So on Sunday afternoon, Miss B was playing in the garden and <3 and I had gone inside for a while, when we heard a scream that sounded a bit more serious than one which accompanies "I have wet socks" so we got outside PDQ to find the little monkey lying on the ground, holding her arm.

Now, my medical training amounts to a couple of half day first aid courses, so I'm no expert, but I was pretty sure that arms bend at the elbow and wrist, but not usually anywhere in between, so the diagnosis was pretty obvious. We figured it would be best to splint the arm, so with a large wooden spoon tied on by a couple of muslin squares, we got into the car for the drive to the John Radcliffe hospital. After some tears, B fell asleep for most of the journey.

At the hospital we went through a series of reception, triage (where we had the "oh, so you're the girl with the wooden spoon!"), X-ray, minor injuries, kiddies minor injuries (where they put on a temporary plaster splint), back to X-ray, and then finally up to a ward. During this we learned that B had a clean break of both ulna and radius, and that the plan was to put her under general anaesthetic in the morning in order to straighten the arm properly and put on a proper cast. B was a proper little star through all of this, going through the whole process without complaint — other than some frustration that putting Lego blocks together was much harder with only one functional arm.

So we did a bit of parent juggling with me going home to get some changes of clothing and have something to eat while <3 put B to bed, then <3 going home for the night while I got what sleep I could on the couch in B's bay on the ward. At least B managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep despite her arm being strapped up in an elevated position, which made her usual night time wriggling slightly comical.

<3 was back with us nice and early and a couple of hours we all trooped down to the trauma theatres (with B looking like the Queen of Sheba as she was wheeled along on her bed). The only tears we had during our time at hospital was when Miss B decided she didn't want to wear the hospital gown that she had been given. Anyway, the little'un was put under (with one of the ward's "play specialists" blowing bubbles to distract her and <3 and I were at last able to get off for a cuppa (no hot drinks allowed on the kids' wards).

We collected B from theatre a little over an hour later and found her in the recovery room looking dazed and groggy but generally OK. Back on the ward, her recovery was impressive: it wasn't long before she was eating toast and drinking squash like it was going out of fashion.

The rest of the day was a bit boring as we waited for the OK to take B home, but this was livened up a little by a trip to the trauma unit to get the plaster cast reinforced with a nice pink covering. This trip took a little longer than planned as our guide got lost on the way — it turns out that the children's wards don't often have much to do with the trauma unit, so some of the staff had never been there before!

Miss B was discharged at about 3pm, so home we went (via a shop where we had promised to buy her a new cuddly toy — she chose a Tigger) and she has been fine since. She's not even requiring pain relief now. There'll be a few more check-up appointments to come over the next few minutes, and we still have some sleep to catch up on, but all is well now.

Some folks like radishes, and some curly kale...

So this weekend saw the 2010 Icknield Way Ale, where approaching 100 morris men (yup, an all boys event, this one) from all over the country gathered to dance, sing, eat and maybe have a beer or two. Four casks of ale from the ever reliable West Berkshire Brewery dealt with the drinks element, three vast vats of stew (plus spuds, coleslaw, pickles, cheese, etc.) provided more solid sustenance, and we managed to look after the rest between us.

A good night appears to have been had by all, though one day I might remember that it is a good idea to get more than an hour and a half of sleep after a lot of drinking and dancing. Oh well, nearly recovered now.

Catching Up 2: Getting Older

Time is ticking away since this, but a couple of weeks I had the first real birthday party I have had since, well, I can't remember. Probably the last for just as long too, but as it was one of those things that people label as a landmark birthday, it seemed a good excuse. So <3 hired a nearby village hall, ordered a cask of ale, invited a lot of people, bought a heap of food, and then we waited for people to turn up...

...Which they did.

So we ended up having a fantastic evening, kicking off with an enormous amount of food and drink to get people started, followed by a series of entertainments. I can't remember the precise order of things, so I'll just blurt out some of the highlights.

First up we had the maiden performance of Lepton Morris, a mongrel morris side (some borders and some Cotswold dances so far) based at work with lunchtime practices. For our first time out of the practice hall, we managed three dances which went pretty well over all. Great for morale.

We were also entertained at a couple of times during the evening by V and K, who had brought some lovely kites to float around the hall. Good fun.

A scratch band played for us while J called a few ceilidh dances for us, including the ever-daft Orcadian strip-the-willow.

We had more morris from Icknield Way, doing a few dances — and later on, G and I danced an amateurish but enthusiastic (and seam splitting) Bampton jig.

Another maiden performance came from Rose Hips, <3's new bellydance troupe using live European folk music for a fun set that really impressed us all. We're looking forward to their next performance at White Horse Ceilidhs at easter.

Then later, things calmed down for a little while before a session kicked off with a good few tunes and songs. This could easily have gone on for several more hours, but we had to be out of the hall by midnight, so had to call it all to a halt as everyone was warming up. A pity, but then again, it's always good to leave 'em wanting more.

That was great fun, so thanks to everyone who came and contributed.

Catching Up: The Kennett Ale

Life has actually been pretty busy lately and I figure I have some catching up to do. So, taking events in no particular order, let's get started.

This weekend was the Kennett Morris Ale, and my second year of attendance. I rolled in a bit on the late side (well, just as things were getting started rather than in the planned good time) due to getting lost in Bracknell, my planned co-pilot having had a better offer in the form of a paid trip to the USA.

We were a bit limited for our show dances as we only had six of our side in attendance, but borrowing a musician for one set and a dancer (who is also a part-time Icknield Way man) we got through pretty well -- and I'm pleased with this picture showing Graham and I getting some fairly decent air on a Bampton dance.

Beer was drunk, chilli was eaten, dances were dances, and songs were sung. Much fun.

In the morning I gave a new friend a lift to the station, taking a rather circuitous route given that neither of us had any idea where the station was. It turned up eventually and I then managed to make my way home for a bit of a lie down.

Getting Jiggy

This weekend was pretty full on. I went with a couple of the other Icknield Way men to Nottinghamshire to take part in the Morris Ring's annual jigs instructional weekend. Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera, so no pictures this time.

For the uninitiated, a jig in the context of morris is a dance typically performed by one or two dancers, usually with only one of them dancing at a time (there are exceptions to all of that) where the emphasis is on individual skill, as opposed to set dances (usually 6 or more dancers) where it's all about the presentation of the group as a whole.

The weekend featured seven Cotswold morris traditions (a tradition is just a group of dances which were collected from one place, and which all have a number of stylistic features in common), with between 45 minutes and twice that dedicated to study of the jigs associated with each of them. That's quite a lot of dancing.

So the weekend went something like this...

Friday... Drove up with the lads, getting to the hall at about 8pm, being presented with dinner, and then getting stuck straight in to an hour of Ascot Under Wychwood, a tradition that was completely new to me. That done, it was off to take up residence at the pub for lots of tunes and singing.

Saturday... Somehow managed to crawl out of the sleeping bag for breakfast and then into the workshops that began at 9am. I was almost out of my depth with the morning Fieldtown and Bledington workshops (mostly struggling with the slow capers), but I think I can work on a couple of the Fieldtown dances and get them tidied up. Then we had a two hour lunch break which included a much needed relax in the pub. After lunch was one of my favourite traditions, Bampton, and I reckon I have three jigs from there which, with a little more practice I could dance out. Following that was the nightmare that was Sherborne -- a great tradition, but massively different from the others I know (it has its own stepping style), so I spent most of the time tripping over my shoelaces. All that done, we got cleaned up, into our proper dancing kit and settled in for the evening's feast -- a top notch meal which set us up nicely for another long night at the pub which this time also included a few set dances, which is always fun when in a very crowded pub where there's barely room to stand, let alone dance!

Sunday... The last lap, with workshops in Oddington (in which I have a little experience) and Headington (of which I have none). Then a quick reprise session where we had a chance to dance through one jig from each tradition. And finally lunch and home.

So, one hell of a weekend. I learnt a lot, and now know of a lot more stuff I want to learn, plus a few new friends. Hopefully I'll be able to go back again next year, but for now... Well, 48 hours after finishing dancing I am almost starting to feel human again.

Quick and Random

So, we're in the last few days of the year and I am about to leave work for the last time before Xmas, and I figured I'd stick a quick post up.

We've been up to loads over the last month or so, but for some reason I just haven't got around to posting anything. We've been to the seaside, got a new freezer, made booze, done morris dancing, learnt new songs (including my first attempt at 4-part harmony since a brief stint in a school choir 25+ years ago), and witnessed the Youngling performing in a nursery Xmas concert (overdose of cute!).

All in all, 2009 hasn't been a bad year really. Let's see what 2010 has for us...

The search for the polos

This weekend was our annual pilgrimage to Pembrokeshire for the banquet. We started driving straight after work and after several stops for food, toilet, and getting Miss B into her PJs we made it to our B&B and went straight to bed.

This gave us all Saturday to potter around and get ready, so we took Miss B to run around on a windswept beach before going back for a dose of CBeebies and sorting out our costumes. I don't have any photos of us all though.

This year the theme was the travels of Marco Polo, so dishes served were taken from China, India and Venice, with one return taken from each. As always the food was superb. From China we had mutton dumplings, crispy duck, plum balls (drool!) and "clairvoyant biscuits" as a subtlety. From India it was breads and chutneys, a fantastic "pre-Columban" (i.e. no chillis) chicken curry, a lovely coconut desert thingy, followed by an (un-) subtlety of a very daft Kama Sutra inspired cake. Finally, the Venician return was pigeon and mushrooms in cream (fantastic), salt fish and bread (wow) and a gorgeous lemon torte, with little chocolate thingies as a subtlety to finish off. Of course there was plenty of mead and ale to wash it all down.

<3 and I were doing entertainment again this year as they haven't worked out how to stop us yet, but at least some quality was introduced into the procedings with one of the other banqueters putting her lovely voice to good use. So <3 wowed everyone with a very delicate performance of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, I got everyone standing up (mostly on chairs), and for this year's firsts: I danced a solo jig in public for the first time (Princess Royal, Bampton — inexpertly, but it went OK) and then drummed (on my djembe -- again inexpertly) for <3 to dance.

Lots of fun. The discussions have already begun on what next year's theme will be.

Frog Racing

So Miss B. has now had what is, to the best of my knowledge, her first boardgame experience. I had a few coloured plastic frogs salvaged from some random game many years ago, so I drew a simple trail of lilypads leading to a win space (I was uninspired, so it was a star). Her Monkeyship coloured this in, while I stuck coloured stickers onto a spare die.

Game rules? Well, they had to be simple enough to explain to someone less than 3 years old, so it was a case of roll the die and whatever colour comes up, that frog jumps on one lilypad and says "ribbit!" The first frog to the star wins.

It didn't take long for this to really catch Miss B.'s imagination and we ended up playing this for well over an hour. Win!

Hissssss... POP!

So Miss B and I went to the "Antiques, Collectables and Crafts" market in town on Sunday and had a lovely time thanks to the swans ride, the music played by some friends of ours, the hog roast, and the presence of the all-but-ubiquitous (in these parts) Professor Crump. The Prof. was doing his usual cycling around, doing bad jokes and making balloon animals which, of course, got Miss B's attention. So while we waited our turn, we had a chat about what to ask for.

"You'll need to ask for an animal," I say. "Ask for a dog or a rabbit."

"Rabbit," she decides.

So our time came and Miss B was asked what she wanted.

"Snake."

At least it was an easy one for the Prof. to make and soon Miss B was strutting around with her balloon snake ("Hissing Sid Rumpo," as the Prof. dubbed him). It was all we could to to prevent her from taking the snake to bed with her later.

Dancing the Icknield Way

OK, so this post is long overdue, but better late than never, eh?

So, on 5th September 2009, twenty-odd members of Icknield Way Morris Men rounded off the celebrations of their 50th anniversary year by dancing along 50 miles of the Icknield Way, starting at Ivinghoe Beacon, ending at Wantage, and with twelve intermediate stops (not all of which were at pubs!). We didn't walk the whole way (that would have killed us!) but we made it, all in one day.

The weekend actually started with a trip up to Wilstone on Friday evening (via a chippy in Tring), where we stayed in the village hall -- and had a great session in the local pub, along with men from the local Whitchurch Morris, who were great hosts (and a couple of their men turned out at a couple of our spots along the tour). The evening finished off, probably ill-advisedly, with a few of us having a dance practice (Glorishears, Bledington and Queen's Delight, Bucknell) in the village hall kitchen, fueled by a polypin of Bob which had magically appeared.

A little the worse for wear, we arrived at the car park by Ivinghoe Beacon and started dancing at 08:45 the next morning. It was nice to be met there by a fella from another side (sorry, I can't for the life of me remember which side) in full kit, who joined in with one of our dances. From then on it was a punishing schedule.

Spots were danced at Tring, Wendover (with a side from Aldbury Morris Men), Princes Risborough (including a chance encounter with a visiting morris man), Bledlow, Lewknor (for a nice ploughman's lunch and a parachute display), Watlington (where we seemed to be the only living things), Ewelme, South Stoke, Goring (for tea with the Kennett Morris Men), Blewbury, and East Hendred before finally rolling in to Wantage at about 19:45. One last spell of dancing and it was in to the King Alfred's Head for dinner with the WAGs.

After food and the obligatory speeches, everyone was absolutely shattered, so unusually for the team there were no songs and tunes. Just some quiet conversation for a while before staggering home to bed.

A great day, which I wouldn't have missed for the world, but I think few of us want to do it again in a hurry!

Another bank holiday weekend

Well, we had our annual house/garden party on Saturday and were lucky enough to have good weather and heaps of friends turning up from all sorts of parts of our lives. Quite a lot of ale (and other stuff) got drunk, a great deal of barbecued food (including the fabulous flatbreads) was eaten, and we went into the evening with a nice conservatory tunes session. Win.

Monday was fun too, with a recovery day behind us. We went off the the Uffington White Horse Show, where a strong turnout from the morris performed four spots in various parts of the showground. This was hard work given how warm the day turned out and how out of practice I, at least, had become over the last month or so.

Now, this coming weekend, we have the last really big event of the dancing season (for us, at least): the Icknield Way tour. To celebrate the side's 50th anniversary, we will be travelling along 50 miles of the Icknield Way (using motorised transport, thankfully), dancing at 14 different locations in a single day, before collapsing into a pub back in Wantage for dinner. Wish us luck.

Weekend

Some of the win from the weekend...

• We all went to a car boot sale at the donkey sanctuary, so saw the donkeys and bought some tat. We also bought a big bag of plums which got made into some very tasty jam.
• Would you believe that we had our first barbecue of the year? Well, we've been to a couple but hadn't had one in our own garden. This particular one featured our new speciality: barbecued flatbreads. We'll be doing them again.
• Another gallon of turbo cider is on its way. This time I have added a cup of tea to see how that affects things.
• Finally got around to watching In Bruges and laughed pretty much the whole way through. Great stuff. This was on <3's recommendation, and a good one. One of these days I'll persuade her to watch Fight Club.

Command History

Spotted on an old post from an abandoned blog out in the geek hinterlands, but I figured I'd have a go.

history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}' |sort -rn | head

Got that?

Well, I work on quite a few machines, but there are two major Linux accounts I use: my networked (NIS) account and the separate account on my desktop box. So, desktop first...

  110   ssh
   76   ls
   73   td
   48   cd
   47   svn
   38   vim
   16   grep
   10   ping
    9   pushd
    9   less

As you can see, I ssh out quite a lot. 'td', by the way, is a little script I use for managing a to-do list.

And the network account...

  192   sudo
  171   ls
   68   glite-wms-job-status
   48   cd
   42   cat
   41   rm
   35   for
   34   history
   19   firefox
   18   man

So I sudo a lot — I'm an admin, what can I say? The 'glite' command is a grid operation from when I send test jobs out to exercise parts of our cluster (and most of the 'for' commands are sending out test jobs). Amazing how often I trawl history too! The 'firefox' invocations are mostly from yesterday when I was trying to work out why weird things were happening. But that's another story.

Of course, the number of concurrent sessions I have open on both of these accounts does distort the history a bit, but it's still interesting for me to see what I get up to!

firefox -no-remote

While checking out a user query this morning I stumbled across something quite bizarre: I launched Firefox from an (X-forwarded) ssh session on one of our servers, only to have the browser open a window on my desktop machine instead. Yes, I wanted the browser to display on my desktop, but not to actually run there.

So, after a heap of mucking about and fruitless web searching I eventually got fruitful and found the information I needed. Apparently this is a long-standing feature: Firefox on a remote machine will hand off to a process already running on your local box if it is available. This will nicely help to prevent overloading on servers (and is probably usually an appropriate thing to do) but runs counter to my intuition and, if my searching the web is anything to go by, to that of a good many others out there.

It must be said, however, that the majority of users out there will never notice this behaviour, or even begin to give a damn about it.

The way around this, incidentally, is to launch Firefox with the '-no-remote' option. Easy, huh?

[2008-08-24 Edit: s/--no-remote/-no-remote/]

Vegelicious

It's a bit sad. Our broad beans and peas are now just about giving up their last and we are now half way through the spuds. The peas (Feltham First), in particular, have been a spectacular success, providing us with a regular veg portion for something like two months now. I'm leaving the rest of them, along with the broads, to fatten up and dry for either winter pulse supplies or next year's seeds.

On the plus side, we're doing OK for courgettes, have a row of gorgeous red chard, a decent amount of carrots, the French beans are just starting to crop (and the runners look like they won't be far behind), there's enough spud left for at the rest of this month, and I'm backfilling the space they leave with pumpkins, the leeks are looking like they'll provide a good winter crop, and I've just sowed a row each of carrots and pak choi. I do need to start some more lettuces, though.

These new raised beds are really making gardening so much easier. I may even add more this winter.

After the Big Bang

Outside my office there is an old, faded scientific poster about the history of the universe. Most of the poster is made up of a diagram. In one corner there is a legend which has a kind of poetry to it:

Gold region:
After inflation,
the expansion
always slows down.

I think we can all identify with that.