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!