So you’re probably thinking ‘Rock Paper Scissors isn’t very interesting in the first place - what could v2.0 possibly add?’. That’s what I was thinking.

Here is the answer.

In flat on own. Must leave. Must find someone to play against. Via.

Since we started selling books on Amazon, we’ve had three complaints. Two were from people unhappy with the condition of their book, and both times the books were marked as ‘acceptable’, which is Amazon’s lowest quality rank. This doesn’t mean the rank contains anything that should be ‘bad’, but it does mean the book isn’t ‘good’. But, most people aren’t aware of this, and there’s no reason we should expect them to be. To make sure it’s clear, we always put an appropriate description in the individual item details. I genuinely think the first two complainants had unreasonable expectations, and it’s annoying when one ‘neutral’ feedback heavily affects our visible-to-everyone positive-feedback percentage score.

Today, though, the lady had a point. She’d bought the hardback and we sent a paperback. Fair enough. I haven’t yet figured out whether Amazon’s data is flawed or we messed it up, but whichever, the customer was justified in being annoyed. I refunded her as soon as I confirmed the problem, and braced for the probably ‘negative’ feedback, which would be a first.

She gave us a positive rating, with 4 marks out of 5. There was a problem, she said, but it had been sorted quickly and she’d happily buy from us again.

I am, frankly, astonished. Sometimes people are delightful.

I was looking for pictures of tightrope walkers this evening. Flickr kept thinking I meant ‘tight rope’, which brings up very different results. *shudder*. Still, I found some cool stuff, but kept being drawn back to this guy:

Now that’s street entertainment. There’s something about this shot I really like - maybe it’s that he looks like a visitor from the past, and I’ve always had a thing for Victorian London. Whatever, it simply rocks.

I like this shot too - yikes.

It’s three and a half weeks until my photo projects are due in, and I’m currently flailing in PrePanic, hoping to avoid a full-on FreakOut. My abstract photos aren’t going well. I wanted to do camera-tossing, but the results weren’t all that great. There’s literally one good shot, with another that’s ok, and I really need 3 excellent / 5 not-bad. If I want to progress I need to throw the camera higher, so it can spin more during exposure, on scenes other than my computer monitor. But with only 3.5 weeks, slide film being expensive to buy/develop and slow to process, plus the possibility of wrecking my film camera, I can’t justify continuing with that one. I took way too long to decide this, hence today’s flailing.

So this afternoon I set up an idea I had last night. Here’s how it turned out on digital, and I haven’t processed the results beyond converting them from RAW. In theory, the developed slide film should look the same:

I was really happy with this. It’s basically a straw in a cup of lemonade, backlit by a coloured flash. This was perfect. Pretty, detailed and definitely abstract, I could easily come up with a few variations. So I switched to my film camera.

Nope.

None of my film lenses will focus close enough. If I back off I get un-abstract-background in the frame, and obviously slide film can’t be cropped in post-production. Even my cheap-and-cheerful 300mm zoom, once I was standing across the room, couldn’t handle it. My digital lens can presumably focus on objects closer to the lens because of some smaller-frame-optics thing I haven’t figured out yet. Dammit! It’s so frustrating to have the setup in place and be able to get good results, yet not on the medium required.

</damian>damned old technology. Who uses slide film anyway? What’s the point? Grumble grumble.<damian>

I need a macro lens, or maybe some extension tubes…It’d be cheapest to hire the former, I think. The university may be able to give me one, but that’ll take some time. Hmmm. Shall figure something out.

I’ve been exhausted today, after a heavy weekend. A friend invited me to help install and configure a startup’s network, and both nights neither of us got to sleep until 0300.

The company had quite the setup: 24″ monitors, VoIP phones, a beautifully-sunlit open-plan office, Aeron chairs, the lot. Their building had network wiring already, and it was our job to get everything connected and talking to each other (or not, if you’re a VoIP phone and a PC). I’ve never configured anything quite so high-end before. We had Sawyer the 24-port gigabit ethernet switch (brawn, didn’t need to do anything fancy), Jack the 24-port fast-ethernet switch (less powerful, but needed to do clever routings) and Hurley the wireless router (wireless = the cool bit) all connecting to Kate the ultra-configurable mega-secure Cisco router (ultimately in charge, and physically under both the switches). Everyone needed internet access, and it all had to work via DHCP - all settings being supplied automatically once connected to the wall / wireless. Each component threw up problems at times, and it was quite the challenge.

As ever, the toughest problems were sometimes the fastest - denying intra-subnet communication took five minutes, despite being a major worry - while the insignificant things ate up time - the network printer Just Didn’t Respond, and took two hours to fix. At times we delved into Cisco’s formidable command-line-interface, and discovered various deficiencies in their generally ultra-swish GUI. We also ate a lot of muffins. And bon-bons.

By 0130 on Monday morning everything was wired up and talking to each other. It was quite the relief! Today we heard nothing until this evening, when a call said everything had run fine. This is pretty rare - there’s always something broken - and we’re concerned they’re using next door’s wireless.

There was a hell of a learning curve and the pressure got to us both at times, but it was great fun nevertheless. I’ve also grown quite fond of Cisco routers. You might need a degree in jargon to configure the things, but they’re seriously powerful toys.

There’s no reason for anybody to believe this, but I bought an enormous packet of strawberry bon bons¹ today, completely by accident. They were hanging over the supermarket conveyor belt, and something tall must have knocked them into my shopping. Actual accidental purchasing of bon-bons! Who am I to argue with fate? Nom nom nom.

1. incidentally, there are only so many times you can type ‘bon bon’ before the words start to look really weird [↩]

I’ve been tagged by Martin.

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The nearest book right now is Photography in Print, and p123 is an excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s “The Salon of 1859″. The sentences are ambiguous, but I think this is reasonable:

In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day Credo of the sophisticated, above all in France (and I do not think that anyone at all would date to state the contrary), is this: “I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature (there are good reasons for that). I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature (a timid and dissident sect would wish to exclude the more repellent objects of nature, such as skeletons or chamber-pots). Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art”. A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah.

Insufferable man.

Tagging (only if they’re interested, of course): Lil, Paul, Abi, Skuds…um.

I hadn’t heard of Will Smith’s new movie ‘Hancock’ before, but the trailer really, really got my attention. Saying anything else would spoil it - just take a look, trust me.

I’ve spent the last two days essay writing, so it’s a bit quiet here atm. I’ve finished a first draft, bar the conclusion, but am now starting to doubt my interpretation of the question. Thankfully it’s not due in for another month - I somehow forced myself to sit down and start - so there should be plenty of time to hone it. If anyone has any thoughts on whether ’straight photography’ really counts as photographic Modernism, please get in touch.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of my inexplicably 7-month-old little niece:

In the corner of my parents’ office is a small computer acting as a file and email server. It’s a little workhorse that’s been going for ages, but late last year it started turning itself off. Mum and Dad would arrive in the morning and find it inexplicably lightless, despite no power cuts.

I tracked it down to the weekly full HD-clone backup, and could at least reproduce the problem: the machine just conked out, with no blue-screen or anything in the windows event log. This suggested it was hardware-related, and there were a few possibilities, the most likely being one of the hard drives. I tried running full sector scans, but it conked out halfway through. I took them away, but found no errors. The next most likely cause (I thought) was the power supply. So I replaced that and the next backup promptly reported sector errors on one of the hard drives. So I replaced that too, and the backup completed - yay!

A week later: same problem.

So I swapped out the RAM. No difference. At this point I was starting to think it must be Random Motherboard Crap. Sometimes you get a problem you can’t trace, so you replacing the motherboard+cpu, and everything’s ok but for the lingering feeling that maybe you missed something. In this case, I would indeed have missed something if I’d replaced the lot.

Last week I sent an email around to various friends, asking if they had any other thoughts. My friend Ben got back to me the same evening with a list of things to try, one of which was a stress test - did it fall over under high cpu load? I tried Prime95 last night and the machine fell over in minutes - far less time than the backup typically took to take down the system. It was pretty late by this point, so I stopped for the night and while driving home suddenly realised the incredibly obvious possiblity.

This evening I ran the old-school Motherboard Monitor, and watched as the stress test took the CPU temperature up to 105 degrees celcius. 105 degrees! That is a ridiculously high temperature for a non-ancient CPU. So I took a look inside, really really hoping I hadn’t somehow missed the CPU fan having fallen off, or something. No - the fan was in place and still going, but there was a bit of dust clogging the heatsink. I vacuumed it up and re-ran the stress test.

It peaked at 66. A not-crazy amount of dust had increased the temperature by 40 degrees! It survived the stress test without issue, and is currently running a full backup for the first time in months¹.

I’m a little annoyed I didn’t think of this. Overheating used to be the go-to problem for random shutdowns, but modern computers run so cool that it’s now pretty uncommon. But it shouldn’t have taken me four months to figure it out. Oh well, at least they’ve got a shiny new power supply.

How come the backup completed that once? Could be chance, but I bet I left the side of the case off, having just installed the new drive. Still didn’t twig, though.

I think Ben was thinking ‘overheating’, but didn’t want to say it so bluntly so I wouldn’t feel bad. He’s subtle that way. Thanks, Ben!

1. not quite so bad as it sounds - the important files were being backed up online, but this is far from optimal. Golden rule of backups is always have two systems, because one of them will always be broken at the critical moment [↩]

Welsh channel S4C filmed a love scene for drama Caerdydd¹ inside a baby-changing room at the Welsh Assembly. Some people aren’t happy, including Conservative William Graham:

This is obviously unpleasant and unnecessary. Potentially it’s distressing for people who don’t like the idea of one of the buildings they funded being used in this way.

Do they not show Torchwood in Wales? Then came the most cognitively dissonant statement ever:

One doesn’t want censorship but nothing that is controversial or concerning should happen.

Coincidentally, this is also the Conservative Party’s new slogan.

1. the website for which is currently displaying ‘Bad Request (invalid verb)’ [↩]

James Randi is undoubtedly the most famous skeptic in the world. From his debunking of Uri Geller to the JREF forums / website, he’s been on my radar since I was a kid. He’s rarely in the UK, so when I heard he was visiting I eagerly snapped up tickets for his only public talk, at the NSS’s Conway Hall last Saturday. He was flanked by five big names in skepticism, and the sell-out evening didn’t disappoint.

Richard Wiseman handled compere duties with aplomb, mixing magic and jokes, and seemed totally comfortable in front of an audience. Chris French then introduced the evening and gave some background on Randi, after which Simon Singh talked about his own fairly recent discovery of the skeptical movement. Unfortunately I have a problem with Simon Singh, as I was explaining to Abi on Saturday morning.

Some years back he wrote an article criticising a scientifically-dubious Katie Melua lyric. I cannot support him on this, as one day Katie will be mine and I clearly don’t want to jeopardise our relationship. Simon actually brought this up - the article, not the inevitable marriage - during his talk, and it turns out that Katie had phoned him a couple of days later and arranged a recording of a scientifically-accurate version of the song. Excellent - I can now like Simon Singh, and clearly Katie is even cooler than I thought. Sigh.

Ben Goldacre was as cool as you’d hope, if unfortunately beset by technical problems. His entertaining talk was also a neat demonstration of how sharp and knowledgeable the audience were - he mentioned the historical practice of alternative medicine practitioners creating fake qualifications, adding it was something that continued to this day. A murmur showed we knew exactly who he meant, and he was able to continue without mentioning her name, which pleased everyone

Then came the full-of-energy Susan Blackmore, who I’d most recently heard reducing a catholic commentator to incoherent ranting on the Jeremy Vine show, and she didn’t disappoint in person. She gave a presentation on her work on parapsychology, and her journey from believer to skeptic. She gave this up in the 90’s, but seemed to indicate she might be getting back into it, which would be a nice development.

After a break it was time for the main event: Randi himself. He’s weirdly familiar - I’ve seen / heard him countless times in the past few years, and seeing him in person is oddly surreal. He spoke for an hour on general skepticism, and showed a few clips of his most impressive moments on the Johnny Carson show: psychic surgery, and taking out Peter Popoff. I hope it’s not too patronising to say that for for a 79-year-old he was remarkably spritely! Very much on top of things, completely comprehensible and as acerbic as ever. I hope I’m in such shape at that age. He was, as ever, a touch negative regarding the whole fight against woo - other speakers had the same sentiment, but didn’t seem so bothered - but that’s forgiveable, given how long he’s been around!

This was first event of its type to be held in London, and seemed to go well enough that more will be arranged. Hopefully next time the speakers will be able to get into some decent skeptical meat. I enjoyed the evening, but it was designed to be fairly light and introductory, with even Randi giving a pretty unfocussed speech, and I’d love to listen to a proper dissection of a topic. Definitely worth going, though, and I got to see some of my intellectual idols up close.

I’m not really one for pubs, and I felt intimidated to the point of wanting to hide under a chair at a skeptical meetup on Saturday, but tonight’s Skeptics in the Pub could be quite exciting. Phil Plait’s the guest speaker, and he just posted news of something which might, just might, be a direct, laboratory detection of dark matter. Even if not, it’s something new and unexplained. Coooooooool.

Plans are afoot to change the priorities of royal succession. Currently, if King William¹ has a daughter, then a son, then falls off a horse, the son will become King because men = better. Some people think this needs to be changed, which seems reasonable. Having said that:

These are people who can arbitrarily pardon criminals, dismiss governments, command the army, and run out Established Christian church whose ministers get a free say in the running of the country on the basis that they were born into the right family, and you’re concerned that that might be sexist?!

Fair point.

1. or whatever he decides to call himself - I suggest ‘Kong’ [↩]

I recently decided I’m not fit enough. I used to get plenty of exercise, with a three-mile dog walk twice a week, a weekly couple of hours of dancing, and daily mile-long walks into town and back. Unfortunately the dog is now only around on days I’m not, we no longer have the exhausting dancing practice sessions and the daily walk is getting boring, so only happens a couple of times a week when I force myself (I need a new route). So I’m basically doing nothing aerobic. 

This is all totally pants, and what with research showing aerobic exercise is absolutely vital in keeping the brain functioning at reasonable levels, won’t do. I’ve also been noticing that my stomach sticks out much more than it used to, which is undoubtedly down to too much chocolate, and I really don’t like it. These two were enough to finally spur me into action.

So I decided on a new regime involving cycling and using my parents’ cross-trainer twice a week. This got off to a slow start, but I’m now forcing myself to do it. I spent 30 minutes on the cross-trainer this evening and felt appropriately exhausted, which was the intention. Then I weighed myself.

I’m as light as I’ve been in years. And years. In fact, the BMI calculator reckons I’m underweight (edit) below the recommended minimum. WTF. Are my muscles wasting away? I know fitness and weight are different, but still, that’s just weird. Maybe the scales are broken. I’ll see what happens if I keep exercising - hopefully I’ll get heavier?