Oh wow, I have a blog!

I'd forgotten I had this- time moved quickly; I had a new job, new hobbies, new friends. Totally forgot about my poor old blog.

So what's happened since then and now? Lots of things. Had a relationship, messed it up. Spent a lot of money on telescopes. Visited Lithuania twice (it's very nice, 9/10- would rate higher, but coffee is served in very small cups).

Got better at astrophotography too. Two years ago, I posted my pics of Messier 57, the Ring Nebula. Here's a more recent attempt using narrowband filters:



And here's a picture of the Western Veil Nebula in HaRGB (true colour plus fancy narrowband data for added zazz) that I'm quite happy with:


And that's really that so far. Perhaps I'll post more later.

Looking Up

I've always been interested in astronomy and have owned a couple of telescopes, but lately it's really taken over my life. Back in March, I wound up buying a Celestron Neximage 5, which is a sort of modified webcam that you attach to your telescope to take pictures of the moon and planets. These are high-brightness objects where the main obstacle to a good picture is the state of the atmosphere. Air currents cause the image to wiggle and waver like it's at the bottom of a pan of water just on the edge of boiling. To deal with this, you take lots and lots of very short exposure pictures- perhaps as high as a hundred frames every second. Once you have your pictures, you sort through for the best and digitally stack and mess with them to bring out the sharpness. Happily, there's a lot of cheap (even free!) software that will help automate the process of taking, aligning and stacking a thousand-plus frames of video.

My first photo of the moon

Jupiter, complete with red spot. Two moons can also be seen

Mars, or possibly a space potato. The polar cap is to the upper left, the dark triangular region is Syrtis Major Planitia

Montes Caucasus region, the moon.

Saturn, with the Cassini division plainly visible in the rings

Saturn at a lower power of magnification

My first few pictures lit off something of a fire in me, so I went out and got a much better mount than the one with my telescope (a Celestron Nexstar 6se- the mount's great for visual work, but for photography, a bit wobbly and doesn't track so well)  and also a second-hand 200mm Newtonian reflecting telescope from eBay.

Next came a new camera. The neximage 5 is well suited to bright planets and the moon, but not useful for dimmer objects like star clusters, nebulas and whatnot where you don't want high framerates but long exposures of several minutes. The Neximage 5 would rapidly build up a flood of thermal noise in the picture at that kind of exposure, so I picked up a cooled astronomical CCD camera to use for deep sky work.

The problem with long exposures, though, is that it requires extremely precise tracking- if the telescope doesn't perfectly follow the motion of the stars, they will start to streak the image. Partly this can be solved by a very accurate set-up of the telescope, so that its axis points towards the celestial north pole, near where Polaris, the pole star lives. Unfortunately that's tricky for me as I don't have good visibility to the north, as the house is in the way. I have to do a bit of messing around with what's called "drift alignment", which I haven't quite mastered yet. To help with any remaining inaccuracies, most astrophotographers use auto-guiding, where they have a smaller telescope fitted to the main one, and a second camera that takes an exposure every second and feeds it to a computer that checks the star positions between frames. If there's any drift, the computer sends commands back to the telescope mount telling it to shift position slightly to line things back up.

I don't have the ability to do auto-guiding yet, what with money and stuff (maybe next pay-day...) so I hadn't tried deep-sky astrophotography until last weekend. I'd gone out to take more pictures of Saturn, but it took me longer than I expected to set up, so by the time I was ready, Saturn had ducked behind the trees. Not wanting to totally waste the night, I decided to at least try the CCD camera just to get some experience working with it.

I'd only roughly aligned the mount (the goto contoller was telling me I was out by five times the apparent diameter of the moon!), so I knew I couldn't take long exposures. I hadn't planned on doing deep-sky work, so I hadn't had the camera's cooler switched on, so long exposures would wind up with lots of thermal noise anyway. It's almost bang-on the time of year where the nights are so short they never get properly dark and I really wasn't expecting much of anything. I set the goto controller to point to Messier-57 and stared into the eyepiece at a faint grey circle that may or may not have been my imagination. Yeah, not much of anything.

I swapped the eyepiece for the camera and started up Nebulosity on my laptop. Right there in the preview window was a ghostly grey ring. I might get something out of this after all!

Exposure to 10 seconds- keep them short to avoid streaking, but switch the camera to 4x4 binned mode, where 4x4 squares of pixels in the camera are added together to make one pixel in the image, producing a lower resolution image but with sixteen times the sensitivity to light. Take a sequence of five images and let's see!

A picture! Noisy and low-res, but a picture! M57, the ring nebula, and with colours right there in the picture!

I also took some dark frames to compensate for noise and also did a set of five images at 15 seconds exposure and 2x2 binning for more resolution at the cost of less sensitivity and more trailing of the stars.

Sure, the Hubble Space Telescope may have taken far better pictures, but they had a higher budget AND ASTRONAUTS. I had a few bits of silicon and some bent glass I bought off eBay!

Is this thing still on?

It has been a while since my last post.

Things have changed in the last nearly-two-years. I changed jobs, for starters. A colleague at my last job wound up killing himself. Although I doubt it was (solely) work-related, I decided it was yet another sign I might be happier elsewhere. It hadn't helped that I'd been involved in getting the guy recruited in the first place, yet learned more about him trying to find his next of kin for the police by reading his facebook page, than I had with him sat right there in the office for months.

This is the future, slam, slam, slam.

This morning, I managed to slam my dominant hand in the office door, resulting in blood and swearing. The pain was and still is remarkable and the insistent throbbing discomfort is exactly like what it feels like to be living in modern-day England, only in my hand. Hooray!

I am in a bad mood, you see. Partly it's the announcement that the London Olympics will be protected by laser-guided hypervelocity cluster-missiles, presumably to blow up anything that doesn't have enough corporate sponsorship. Partly it's the miserable embarrassment we have for a government (and I'm including the loyal opposition in that). Partly it's how crap everything has become.

But mostly it's my hand hurting. That's a direct and immediate pain that takes all of my attention and is hard to ignore, unlike London boroughs farming their poor out to less expensive parts of the country, or the overly close attachment all our politicians have to people whose hideously disgusting personal wealth commands all their attention, unlike the ghastly poverty-stricken proles they pay lip-service to representing. Or the way the global economy seems to be committed to self-destructing. Or the way I'm nearly forty now and a sad and lonely speck in a sad and lonely world.

On a brighter note (magnitude -4 or thereabouts), here is a picture I took during last month's conjunction between the Moon and Venus. It's a bit rough as I was using my phone to take the pic as timing was everything.

Back Again

A busy day. Two software releases, goofing about with Google Fusion Tables, solving someone's problems with a phone I've never really used,  trying to work out whether I'm just imagining that everything changed in the one day I wasn't in the office on a work day, answering various customer and helpdesk queries, and triple-checking everything I type in case it gets all gibberishy.

 Next up, steam-mopping the floor a bit.

Tyred

The illness progresses apace. My nose is running like unto a tap whilst my brain is most decidedly not running at all. It keeps hitting breakpoints that I didn't set up and the stack trace seems to be for a different process entirely.

Yes, I am mixing my metaphors like I mix my drinks. Badly.

Given it took me an hour to fry three sausages, it was not the best time to get my car in to the garage for a Service and MOT. Four new tyres and the geometry realigned. I have to admit I Googled "tyre geometry realignment" to check that it wasn't a made-up thing because today they could probably have told me my Ring System needed a Cassini division and I would have gone for it. The only car where that might be an actual thing would be GM's old Saturn brand, which has gone the way of the Sega Saturn.

My face burns from the constant blowing of nose. Tomorrow, I must go to work and do a software release for one guy.

Flares Are Back!

Apparently I do requests now, as someone who shall remain nameless wanted me to post about this.


On Thusday night, I saw my first-ever Iridium flare! If you're too lazy to click on the link to Wikipedia (or they're SOPA'ed out again), I will explain it myself with lies and half-truths and everything.

Some years back, a bunch of rich idiots including but not limited to Bill Gates and Motorola decided that America knew what the world wanted in a mobile phone, namely a handset the size of a breezeblock that cost $3,000 minimum and a contract that would charge $10 a minute of calltime. 

The thing is that America is a big country that is sparsely populated for most of its territory. The cost of fitting conventional GSM towers all over the nation to give European-style levels of coverage would cost billions. BILLIONS! 

The solution? Well, how about bigger cells? Trouble is, for the shortwave frequencies that go furthest without needing huge antennas and frying the users head, the earth's curvature becomes a problem as the radio broadcasts only go out to the horizon. 

So, how do you see further over the horizon? From higher up. 

Instead of a network of hundreds of thousands of cell towers, they envisaged a network of seventy-seven satellites in low-ish Earth orbit, providing phone coverage not merely across the US, but ANYWHERE ON EARRRRTHHHH (and also in any nearby space stations). 

The seventy-seventh element in the periodic table is Iridium, so that's where they got the name. 

A couple of problems occurred. One was that Satellites are REALLY expensive, as are the rockets to launch them. The other was that GSM networks spread like crazy, even in poor countries that'd never had a fixed-line telephone network, as the cost of GSM kit was hugely less than millions of miles of copper cable. As more people bought GSM network gear, the cost went down and down and down. 

In the meantime, the cost of the satellites went up and up and up. Eventually, they had to settle on only sixty-six, but didn't rename the network to element 66, possibly because Dysprosium sucks as a name. 

Eventually, they launched their network and sold services to basically no-one outside of international news services and ultra-rich yachtsmen. They ran into financial difficulties and would have died a death if it hadn't been for a little old thing called war. 

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq revealed that a lot of the fancy communications gear the US Armed forces had spent billions of moneys on was in a lot of ways pretty crap. All around them, embedded journalists were running round with phones that were more reliable, more rugged and more effective than the Army's own kit. The Pentagon immediately started throwing money at Iridium and everyone was happy except for the people who got bombed and shelled and stuff thanks to a phone call but they were all non-American and thus didn't count. 

Aaaaanyway, the interesting thing about Iridium is the satellites. Ignoring the one that crashed into a Russian Strela-2M communications satellite, the surviving Iridium satellites have one very interesting design feature, a pair of large, flat, mirror-finish radio antennas. 

Around dawn and dusk, passing Iridium satellites will reflect the sun's rays down to earth, appearing for a few seconds as a *really* bright moving star (up to thirty times brighter than Venus!). Some flares are visible in broad daylight! 

The great thing is they're predictable. I have an app on my Android smartphone that takes my GPS position and works out where and when I'll see a flare (actually it cheats and asks a web server to do the hard sums). Tonight, I went out at the appointed time (18:34), looked where the pointy thing said and waited. 

Out of nowhere, a star appeared. It got brighter until it looked like the main light of a plane without the wingtip lights or blinking anticollision lights; it moved steadily north-east and then faded down to invisibility again. 

I'd seen a half-tonne satellite seven hundred miles up while it was somewhere over the North Sea, a little south of Norway! 

And that was my evening.


For you kids too cool for smartphones, you can always try www.heavens-above.com as that'll do the same job as the app.

Russia- Land of Smiles and Candy

Since I am ill, I have spent much of the weekend watching films and sneezing.

Russian films are depressing. Russian war films are really depressing, especially if they're based on historical events. I quite liked the handful of Russians I've actually met and they all seemed a lot more fun than the Finns they worked for. It seems really rather unfair that as a nation their history is like one big long miserable Blues song with Vodka standing in for Bourbon and all to the sound of Balalaikas rather than the Steel Guitar.

Case in point: Compare and Contrast "Saving Private Ryan" and "Fortress of War" (AKA "The Brest Fortress"). Spoilers abound:

Saving Private Ryan:

• Omaha Beach is a horrible nightmare but the beach is taken. Watch out Hitler, Uncle Sam is comin'! (also those rubbishy British and Commonwealth types, but they don't count)
  
• Tom Hanks nearly gets squished by a tank.
• Most everyone dies, but Ryan is saved. Mission Accomplished!

Fortress of War:

• The Siege of the Fortress is a horrible nightmare but... actually, it's just a horrible nightmare followed by four more years of horrible nightmare where twenty million more Soviet soldiers and civilians die. Nobody even knows about the defender's desperate attempts to hold out until the nineteen fifties, after Stalin's safely dead and isn't likely to get all elevated if people mention how badly the whole Buddies-With-People-Who-Hate-Communists thing went on.
  
• Everyone dies (including women and children), bar the Orphan boy and the one guy who knew the Nazis were going to attack and that the fortress is unprepared. He spends years in a POW camp and is kicked out of the Communist party after the war for being taken prisoner and not dying. Even the fat, jolly NKVD commander who randomly dances at people and is very kind and understanding to the guy who is going to be put on trial (and no doubt shot in the face) for spreading alarmist rumours about an impending attack from Uncle Joe's Bessie Mate Hitler, even he dies.
  
• The Orphan boy (who is an orphan) has his brother, his girlfriend and his tuba shot and killed. Basically everyone he has ever known at all dies horribly.
  
• Also, he is deafened by a bomb.
• Lots of people, mostly civilians, actually do get squished by a tank. 
• Mission not accomplished.

Come on Russia; let's have a single century where the average citizen's life isn't one long depressing miserable misery. Also, stop trying to defeat attacking troops by RUSHING OUT FROM HARD COVER in an attempt to bash men with MACHINE GUNS in the face with spades and WINDOW FRAMES.

Illin' like a Villain.

I am full of a cold.

What a tragedy! But the kicker is since this is CAMERON'S BIG SOCIETY, I don't get sick pay when I'm ill so I shall have to struggle to work and be ill on everybody else or be unable to pay for things like gas, electricity or the fuel to get to work. Yeah, I'm a Subsistence Software Engineer.

So I shall go to work and every one else will get my cold. Last time I was ill, I gave it to the boss. He didn't threaten to fire me, he threatened to shoot me.

Less paperwork that way.

I am a bad person who should post more

New Year's Resolution: Blog More, because the world hangs on my every word.

It's been a busy old year what with one thing and another. Work is something of an uphill run except with navigation performed by a cross between a Rally Car navigator, a driving test instructor and Yoda (for the whole sitting on your shoulders whilst you run thing), so that your course isn't determined by practicalities such as terrain or final destination, but by someone yelling "Turn left! Turn right! Do a barrel roll!" in your ear every few seconds. Still, we've managed to get some interesting things done, though I have developed a powerful hatred for a certain mobile phone network.

My grandmother died. Same day as Steve Jobs, so once again I had to deal with the loss of a close relative at the same time all the press is eulogising someone I didn't particularly care for. Last time it was the death of my mother versus the death of Jade Goody. Jobs may have been something like a tremendous control freak with a knack for popularising things other manufacturers had been doing for ages, but at least he wasn't a horrible talentless racist idiot.

I get rather down at Christmas what with one thing and another. All commercial media (and the BBC for that matter) is dedicated to rubbing my face in what a tremendous amount of fun I should be having with my family, my friends and my TONNES OF PRESENTS. I don't even have tonnes of presents these days, although a certain person did her very best to swamp me in cool stuff including a pair of actually awesome socks. They're incredibly warm and snuggly and at last I understand why Fell Walkers walk the fells- To have an excuse to wear these socks. Sure they may wind up dying of hypothermia from the knees up, but it's a small price to pay.

So, what can we look forwards to in the new year? I reckon 2-1 odds on economic disaster and 5-1 odds on yet another war, with 10-1 odds on World War 3 in the Entangling Alliances whoops how did we get ourselves into this mess-style.

I told you Christmas made me happy.

Braincrashed

I have given myself a brain injury

I meant to, too.

This is going to take some explaining so bear with me as we go on a journey to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

Okay, really we're going nearly twenty years ago to an office five minute's walk from where I currently work. Way back then, I worked for the UK arm of MicroProse, doin' games and hittin' my co-workers upside the head with laser guns (actually true).

One of the more interesting characters in the office was an artist by the name of Mark Wilson, whose work you can see if you ever dig out the Atari STe version of Civilization, which you totally should because it's aces and much better than the Amiga version because there's not so much disk-swapping. He was quite a Sci-Fi fan, specifically of Dr Who and various extraordinarily bad films. When he'd been at University, he'd been involved in the cinema club and would run all-night showings of some truly magnificent movie catastrophes, and when he wasn't banging on about Dr Who or exactly why his friends had written a dedication to him in a Call of Cthulhu role-playing adventure (or why our head programmer was an evil troglodyte from Greek myth and how we should probably trap him in a giant wicker man and light him on fire, if only we could somehow get hold of all the wicker in the world), he would regale me with stories of the finest film in cinema history.

Starcrash.

No, wait- don't run off to Google it. You'll spoil the fun and the Wikipedia article, while accurate, is dull as hell and makes the film seem a lot more reasonable that the actual film itself. Sure you could Youtube it, but then you'd just be found face down in a coma with cerebro-spinal fluid leaking out your ears and nose from where your brain escaped.


Let's examine the cast. Two big names who aren't at all mismatched. Christopher Plummer and David Hasselhoff. Naturally, they play father and son. Space Emperor father and son, no less. Happily, the film was made in 1979 to cash in on Star Wars fever, so Hasselhoff has not yet transitioned to full-on 'Hoff and does not spoil the subtle balance of the film with his massive personality. Also, he wears a mask with laser eyes.

Next up is the heroine of our adventure, a lady by the name of Caroline Munro. Star of a number of Hammer horror films, including The Abominable Dr Phibes, she is best remembered for starring in an ad campaign for Lamb's Navy Rum and also for being the first woman to be killed by James Bond. Deliberately, anyway. Her main attributes are a willingness to star in a film where about half the time she is wearing a space bikini and fighting other equally scantily-clad women and an ability to be called by the name "Stella Star" without bursting out laughing, as I imagine that film stock was pretty damn expensive, it being a cheap Italian Star Wars knock-off  with all the production values that implies, especially since they'd probably used up half their budget on Christopher Plummer- ten percent on his fee and the rest on the enormous amount of valium he seems to have consumed.

Our heroine's sidekick is interesting. All the way through, I was thinking "who is this incredibly curly-haired scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe?" and "When is the woman with the second-highest billing in the movie going to show up? I bet she looks damn fine in a bikini". Well, it turns out that they were both one and the same person, by the name of Marjoe Gortner. This is remarkable on account of my "scary-eyed lunatic Space Jesus wannabe" comment, which I really did think at the time. Turns out Marjoe (portmanteau of "Mary" and "Joseph") was a revivalist preacher from the age of four, racking up a fortune of some three million dollars by the age of sixteen (a lot in 1960, fully half a Steve Austin). Space Jesus has powers. He brings Stella StaAHAHAHAr back from the dead with his magic gay disco microwave defrost powers and survives being hit with a stick by a bald-headed green man who was probably envious of his lovely locks.

 He also has a lightsaber and uses it to beat troglodytes with. Our Space Jesus is an Angry (and crazy-eyed) Space Jesus!

The villain of the piece is Joe Spinell, AKA Lord Zarth Arn, who has built the most powerful weapon in the cosmos, so big it is built into a planet, that's how big it is! No poxy being mistaken for a small moon for this doomsday weapon, it's a whole planet that destroys people's minds by superimposing the red goop out of a lava lamp on them. Except for our heroes, as they "aren't like normal people". Actual Line.

Lord Zarth Arn (never, ever Lord Arn. Not even Arnie to his bessie mate Elric) has presumably built his terrible doomsday weapon (terrible in the sense that it is rubbish) on account of waking up one day to find out that a mad space-doctor has swapped his skin with that of Edward James Olmos. Also, despite being thin of face, he is surprisingly rotund of tum and should not wear so much skin-tight PVC.

There's a robot too. The fourth worst robot in history ever (the three even worse robots are in this film too thanks to the magic of Stop-Motion Animation!) , his creators couldn't be bothered wasting time giving him a good name, or even a two letter, two number registration like a certain other movie with somewhat better production values. This robot is called "L" or "Elle" and is identical to Elle McPherson is that he has legs and arms and a head. And the name. He is rubbish and his idea for avoiding hypothermia is to lie down in the snow and hold hands. Happily, cave-dwelling trolodytes smash him to bits with styrofoam bones, revealing his giblets to be made from an old, broken movie camera.

I don't want to spoil the plot too badly, partly because there isn't much of a plot to spoil, and partly because the Youtube video I'm going to link to later will do that for you. Instead here are a few highlights:

A giant stop-motion robot made of silver putty and bits of stuff left over from a meccano set. It has robot boobs and flashes red when shot in said boobs. Now I know why every videogame boss in every Japanese bullet-hell shooter flashes red when hit in the vulnerables. It is possibly the worst-animated thing in the history of history. Elbows do not bend that way!

Two smaller stop-motion robots based on the Ray Harryhausen skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts. Problem is, they didn't have Ray Harryhausen.

Music by five-time academy award winner John Barry who scored fourteen James Bond movies, including Goldfinger, for pity's sake! He did the theme music for the Persuaders! He was the first man to use a synthesizer in a film score!

Presumably his contribution to this film was made in the form of scrunched-up music scores covered in dog-ends, cigarette ash and banana peel, with "Crap! What was I thinking?" scribbled on them. I also presume that as a result of his work on Starcrash, he learned to shred stuff before chucking it in the bin.

Enemy spacecraft that fly in trains of five ships with less than half a ship-length between each other. They fly into combat this way too. Happily their ray-guns shoot every-which-way but straight ahead, so there's no danger involved. Also, brakes don't work in space, so no accidental five-spaceship pileups in the Haunted Stars here.

A bigger enemy spacecraft that is a giant hand made of tin cans and model kit sprues. The hand closes into a fist for battle. It has nice, big picture windows that turn out to be a slight tactical weak-point.

Imperial battleships that can stop the flow of time (for three minutes, which is interesting because how does time know the three minutes are up?) and whose primary combat strategy is "It's raining men" through the medium of golden torpedoes full of er- men. Happily, they were up against an enemy with big windows instead of a half-metre thick face-hardened steel hull, because face hardening does not mean "hardened with faces".

Did I mention the bikini chick-fights?

There is no punchline or moral to this blog post, save to say that even after twenty years of anticipation, I was not disappointed, this truly was one of the best worst films I've ever seen. Wherever you are, Mark, I salute you.

Click here, you know you want to.

Vidogame Noir in the End of Days.

So, this Friday I wandered round to Game and bought a Game. L.A. Noir. I didn't listen very closely to the sneak previews so I thought I was going to be a hard-boiled gumshoe who shoots people in the face. Well, I was wrong. I'm an annoying cop who shoots people in the face. The game is slightly weird- the big cases that I work usually result in suspects being taken alive and Due Process being served. However, as I drive from location to location, I pass random "street crimes" and almost without exception these result in hilarious bloodbaths whether I want them to or not. The Street Crimes don't mesh well with the main plot- In a main mission, I get commended for heroism for facing off against a couple of mooks with .38 pistols. In a street crime mission, I shoot up an entire gang of bank-robbers armed with semi-automatic rifles and tommy guns and no-one ever mentions it!

Speaking of things getting shot up, I'm glad I wear a hat in the game, because apparently it is magnetic and attracts bullets away from my face. Every time there's a gun-battle someone WILL shoot my hat off at least once. Yes, I can get my hat shot multiple times because like Indiana Jones, my character will risk life and limb in pursuit of sartorial elegance. Hat shot off? Well, let's stop shooting back at the three gangsters packing submachine guns and go hunting for my damn fedora, even if it means stepping out from cover and into the hot lead hailstorm. Who would do that? I wouldn't do it even in a videogame, but the game itself thinks I should, so I do so even though I'm hauling at the controller going "NOOO! DAMMIT! WHO WEARS HATS ANNNYYWAAAAAYYY???"

The developers have put a lot of effort into making the facial animation as lifelike as possible so that when I'm questioning people, I can pick up on facial cues to work out how much the lying bastard is lying to me. It works rather well for male characters, but for females, it has the side effect of making them all look like hideous wizened trolls, even when they're supposed to be fifteen years old or movie stars or something.

I could do without so much CSI:1946 poking around dead naked female murder victims who may or may not have been killed by the Black Dahlia killer, or by copycats thereof. It's creepy and will probably make the game the year's best seller in Japan.

When not mauling corpses, the clue-hunting sequences are interesting but have one minor problem- when you are near a clue, the jiggler thing in the controlller jiggles to let you know something interesting is nearby. This is fine except that the initial release of the PS3 (which I am playing the game on, not XBox360 for various reasons) came with controllers that don't have jiggly things in them. I got my PS3 on release and have been too skinflint to get the new jiggletrollers so hunting for clues is rather tricky. In the last case, I only found 11 out of 12 clues and got shouted at by the crazy Liam Neeson-a-like who runs Homicide and spouts pseudo-religious wrath-of-god nonsense in lieu of being an interesting, well-developed character.

Speaking of crazy pseudo-religious types, I note with some amusement but not much surprise that as far as I can tell, the May 21st Rapture did not occur and the world has not yet ended. Hardly surprising; ignoring the bit of the bibble that says something along the lines of none can know the hour of his coming because the lord cares not for your dental appointment, if I were an an omnipotent deity, I would have much more interesting things to do than choose 200,000 of the planet's most insufferable wossnames to come live with me at Chez God so they can all stand around being smug at the suffering of all the billions who didn't make the cut. Indeed, assuming that a God would want to choose 200,000 actually decent people, there's going to be a lot of empty heavenly housing-stock. A bit like post-crunch Ireland, but without so much of an impact on the Eurozone and the Queen hasn't made a visit. Yet.

Everything Tweets

Recently, I had to replace my vintage 2006-era iPod as the battery life was down to about three seconds. Someone who owned a soldering iron (like what I do) would probably have replaced the battery, but I used the excuse to move to a new iPod touch.

After buying a new shiny-shiny, what's the first thing you do? Well, the first thing you do is coat it in silicone rubber and add a screen protector that makes any improvements in display technologies a moot point because now there's a plastic film glued to your fancy retina display, but I digress.

Having bought the thing to play tunes, I find that it does rather more; such as let you tweet. For that matter, a Kindle will let you tweet too, as will an Xbox360 and many other random gadgets. Next up is underwear that will twitter to the world about what a horrible person you are if you try to wear them for longer than a day.

If anyone actually develops that as a thing, I will punch them. I'm all for improved personal hygiene (I work in a non-air-conditioned office with an average temperature of 26 degrees Celsius; this sort of thing matters!) but there is such a thing as too much information.

Everything's Vibrations!

I've been reading "classic science fiction" from the olden days when science fiction came in magazines named things like "BOGGLING STORIES!" or "TALES OF WONDERMENT".

Apparently, back in the 1930's any hack with a tripewriter could make a living churning out some right tosh, so long as there were enough thermionic valves, relays, rockets and incredibly dense young women in highly impractical space-suits.

Apparently-apparently, by the space-year 2147 the state-of-the-art in air travel will be giant aeroplanes that seat three thousand people, travel at over THREE HUNDRED miles every hour and use really really big propellers because apparently we will have forgotten about jets for some reason. Also, they will be used to transport large sums of cash (we must have forgotten about electronic funds transfers too), perhaps as much as half a million dollars at a time!

Sky Pirates will use maaagical knock-out gas that not only seeps through air-tight metal aeroplane hulls, but cures cancer as a side effect (no one finds this particularly impressive because they're idiots), then dock their maaagical invisible aeroplanes to the airliners (magnetically, of course, because magnets are magi-er, science!) and sneak aboard before nicking the cash and leaving stock certificates in the Sky Pirate corporation as payment because they're not thieves or anything.

The heroes who set off to defeat the sky pirate are sickeningly tall (the short one of the pair is "only a couple of inches over six feet tall"), sickeningly handsome, sickeningly wealthy, sickeningly clever and basically generally sickening.

They're so very clever that it takes them about an afternoon to invent a maaagical energy source that works off "the heat vibration of molecules" and a similar magical form of propulsion that also works off "directed molecular action".

They're so clever, they realise that the villain's invisibility screen is one of their own inventions that they had written up for "preposterous inventions quarterly" and had completely forgotten about until juuuuuust now, because heaven forbid that anyone else in the world ever invent anything ever!

Anyway, they defeat the villain and stop him curing random airline passenger's cancers. They send him to a loony bin because obviously he's an amazing genius just like them, only a kleptomaniac or something, and by the next story he's all sane and ready to help them fly to Venus in their molecular-action spaceship where they meet big-breasted blue women with extra thumbs and fight a mile-wide aeroplane powered by A HUNDRED PROPELLERS!!!

I can feel myself getting stupider reading these books. Any day now, I'll try to power my phone with atoms, or vibrate my molecules into invisibility or something.

Back then everything was explained by vibrations... Sorry, capital-v Vibrations! Anti-gravity machine? Etheric vibrations. Perpetual motion device? Molecular vibrations. Disintegration beam? More molecular vibrations, possibly transmitted by etheric vibrations. Spooks, spectres and poltergeists? Psychic Vibrations. Crazy television that lets you see things at a distance despite there not being a camera there? Etheric vibrations, part 2: electric boogaloo. Invisibility? Intangibility? Molecular vibrations *again*. Time travel? Vibrations in the FOURTH DIMENSION!!!

Nowadays, no-one really cares about vibrations as an explanation for stuff. The only things I can think of that still use it are Superstrings (all subatomic particles are different kinds of very small vibrating science-string, maybe), Crystal Healing (if they don't go the Chakra or It's-all-Quantum flim-flam routes), the Beach Boys and Ann Summers.

I'm ba-aaaack!

Hello again!

After a long absence, I've been reminded that I have a blog. In my defence, I've been very busy what with work and getting hit in the head and stuff. Also, my laptop was pinched (along with my XBox360, my phone and my dead mother's jewelery). I had the patio door open late one night to let the dogs out and two sods with a machete and a gun walked in, beat me up and took my stuff. Boo.

Here is a pic of me afterwards. Despite being taken on a cheapo netbook webcam (because someone had nicked my phone with a proper camera) and despite me being covered in dried blood, it is still the best recent picture I have of me. I don't photograph well (because I am ugly)

Working man's blues

Well, I've been back at work for two whole days and things aren't any easier yet. The bank account is bare and I won't get paid until the middle of next month. The code I'm working on is complex and there's noone there who understands it in detail as it was all written by a contractor who is long gone and nobody else there really understands Symbian code. I know I'll be able to get on top of it, but I'm not sure how long it'll take to truly master things and I want to try to show some progress as soon as possible, understandably. I fixed my first bug today, though! Shame it was in something that nobody else had noticed was broken, but it's still a fix!

Nice weather we've been having, too. A particularly ghastly billboard poster of Tom Cruise blew away in the amazingly stong winds yesterday, which is exactly the sort of weather-related mishap I can get behind.

Dietary Requirements

Today I went shopping for shirts. Thanks to a discretionary payment of thirty quid from the nice people at my Flexible New Deal provider, I am now the proud owner of a pair of office-style shirts; one in light blue and one in eye-watering maroon for added sassiness.

I shall, however, be going on a diet. Sitting around on my backside for twenty months hasn't helped my shapely physique any, so I'm going to make a proper effort to eat better and get some exercise done. There, I've told the Internet so now I have to live up to my words or I'll be letting the Internet down and Tim Berners-Lee will send round his goons to beat me up.

My trouble is that I wouldn't know a balanced diet if it fell on me. Wah wah not enough time to cook properly wah and so forth, but it's all excuses. What isn't an excuse is the cost of food on a limited budget, what with supermarket prices for decent (i.e. fresh food that isn't ninety-five percent filler products) grub having gone up something like fifty percent. Fortunately that shouldn't be an issue with the whole job thing, so in the future I'll be able to afford named meat and perhaps even vegetables of some description, as opposed to dehydrated hydrogenised vegetable pieces with enhanced colour, and now with actual flavour! ("vegetable" is a registered trademark of the Monsanto corporation, all rights reserved)

Superstitious Dread

Now I have a job offer, I'm in mortal fear of waking up and finding it was aaaaallll a dreeeaaam.  Despite my non-superstitious general cast of mind, I find myself unconsciously trying to Karmically balance myself out so that the pendulum of fate doesn't swing back into "bad luck" with a vengeance.

How do I do that? By watching Michael McKintyre's Comedy Roadshow. By forcing the terrible misfortune of Michael McKintyre on myself, I ought to have something really nice happen to me as recompense.


I bloody 'ate Michael McKintyre. How he has a TV show, I do not know.

Sneezing and Giggling

Today I am unusually cheerful, all the more so, since I seem to have developed a cold.

Earlier in the month I applied for a C# programming job and was asked in to take a technical test. The test itself turned out to be a general programming aptitude test with a made-up language, so the week of C#/.NET revision that I'd done wasn't particularly useful, although I thought it might be handy for any subsequent interview and kept at it as I was sort-of getting in to the whole C#/.NET thing, mostly because Visual Studio 2010 is an absolute joy to use compared to the tools I'd been used to in my old job.

Basically, I was getting carried away with the way autocomplete meant I only needed to type about a third of the code, but I digress.

At the beginning of this week, I got a call back saying that I'd done well on the test and that they would like me to come in for an interview. The strange thing was that when the email confirmation arrived for the interview, it was saying that I'd be interviewing for a Java role. I queried this, and was told that it was indeed a Java position, and was I okay with that?  I was, because I've done Java Micro Edition before (this isn't Micro Edition work, mind) and I was getting a little tired of the way a lot of C#'s keywords are in there not to help the compiler compile, but to prove to the compiler that the programmer isn't a complete idiot and actually understands what it is that their code is doing (for example having to explicitly add the override keyword to functions that override a virtual function in the base class. The compiler doesn't need it- C++ manages just fine without it- but it forces programmers to acknowledge that they're masking an inherited function by hitting them with compile errors if they leave it off).

The only problem with the sudden shift to Java was that I wouldn't have time to do any Java revision, and Java Micro Edition is a massively cut-down version of Java, especially in the CLDC/MIDP profiles used on phones. I was worried that any technical questions would deal with aspects of Java that I simply hadn't needed to deal with on mobiles, such as the collections framework. I know it's there on Real Java, I know what it does and how it uses generics, but I can't say I've ever written code with it. On a mobile, you have to use the rubbishy old Vector class and the like, which isn't type-safe and therefore makes baby Jesus cry.

Aaaanyway, I went to the interview without any massively high hopes and had a good long chat with the two chaps I'd be working with on a daily basis. I explained where I was at with Java, answered a couple of technical questions, and they said that with the amount of C++ experience I have, it won't be an issue. After an hour or so of that, they went outside "for a chat" and asked me if I wouldn't mind sitting another test, this being a language-and-number-skills fifty questions in fifteen minutes sort of thing. I didn't mind, sat the test and was then asked if I had time for a chat with the Boss of Bosses. I agreed and he talked me to death for an hour before they let me loose with the reassurance that I'd done "really well" on the second test and that I'd hear from them by Monday.

It wasn't until I got home until I remembered Monday is a bank holiday.

Friday afternoon, as I'm walking in through the front door after having gone out for some dog food for the idiot dogs, my mobile goes. It's the people I interviewed with and I immediately think they're ringing me up to tell me that they won't be proceeding etc, etc, etc. Instead, they offer me the job!

The paperwork is in the post and once it arrives, I'll be arranging a starting date. No more dole posts! (hopefully)

Idiot Detection, CERN-style.

So, I'm filling out a job application at the CERN website and I click on the drop-down box for "How did you learn about job or training opportunities at CERN?" and what do you suppose the first two options are?

• Angels and Demons - Book
• Angels and Demons - Film

 Oh, that wacky Dan Brown!