Main | February 2005 »

January 25, 2005

Consumer anxiety

The life of a gadget addict is often an unhappy one. All desire may be illusory but that doesn't stand up when you can see a new shiny gadget that'll replace your current, perfectly-fine-but-a-bit-bashed gadget for a mere three hundred euro.

True gadget addicts never buy from high street shops. Usually what's being sought can't even be bought in high street shops, at least not in Dublin. And if they can, it's usually at a ridiculous mark-up, and it's hard to persuade yourself to buy from a shop that invariably knows less about what it's selling than you do.

So, what we do is, we research the gadget exhaustively on the internet. This includes obsessively reading and re-reading every review, news item, and every piece of manufacturer's bumpf you can find. Then, after you justify the price to yourself (easy in this case: it's a reward for finishing my part-time masters! Yay me!) you go ahead and order it.

I placed my order on New Year's Day. Afterwards, crisis struck: they were out of stock. There were more being made, but it'd be (as it turns out) nearly a month before they'd send one out to me.

This was Very Bad News. That's 25 days for reading every forum post about the new toy. The problem is, only the unhappy post about their new toy. There are hundreds of posts out there about how this is a crappy phone. And not enough posts about how it's great. This is not unusual for a fancy gadget, seeing as how those for whom it's working fine are off playing with their gadgets and not posting enraged comments in internet forums about how they've been completely screwed over by companies who unpardonably fail to drop everything to sort out their obscure problems.

But, y'know, all that negativity can get at a person. And slowly wear away their conviction that getting the gadget was a good choice and - quickly now! There's still time to cancel!

But, just in time, my order's been shipped. On balance: hurrah! Brief review to follow.

Posted by Oliver at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2005

What's wrong with Oliver today...

Ah, the internet. Cause of a thousand worries I would never have been aware of otherwise. Today's worry is what lack of sleep can do to a body. I've never been that good at going to bed at a reasonable hour, usually because things are so quiet by 11 or 12 that, if I get stuck into something, I can focus on it for two or three hours without being distracted. Which is satisfying in a getting-stuff-done way, but not so good when you have to get up the following morning for work.

Still, sleep deprivation is this week's excuse for:

Glib excuses in lieu of making actual changes ahoy!

Posted by Oliver at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2005

Ambition for the weekend

Get Monotone set up at home, use it while developing a new stylesheet for this site.

Er, and go out with friends, have drinks, enjoy the weekend and so forth.

(My sweetheart is away for the weekend. Should I not be plotting a wild series of drunken escapades instead of looking forward to getting obscure web stuff done?)

Edit: Got Monotone set up after hoursof Fink compiling away in the background. Got a fair bit of CSS done too, before getting stalled & realising I had no idea of what I wanted this place to look like! Still, I'm still of the (slightly better informed) opinion that Monotone is great. Monotone!

Posted by Oliver at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2005

Pleasure/pain principle & practice

She asks "What is the point of giving somebody with arthritis tablets in a child-proof bottle?!"

I imagine it's only one of many ways sadistic pharmacists get satisfaction.

Posted by Oliver at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

CROMA

I've not seen the language yet, so I'm still not totally clued in, but the winner of this year's Young Scientist won for developing a new Lisp dialect. Exciting obscure programming news! Too hard to explain! Late for dart! More later, hopefully...

Update: A handy Lemonodor post partly by the author himself. Yay. Now I wonder if I should have stuck with Lisp for longer. On the other hand, I am finding Haskell even more liberating...

Regardless, awesome stuff. Hats off to Patrick Collison.

Posted by Oliver at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

Most useless, yet most desirable gadget ever

A big red button. Now, to wire it to post a blog entry...

Posted by Oliver at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2005

Can I post to AWVC using Oddpost, the oh-so-super webmail client?

Yes! Yes I can!

That is all.

Posted by Oliver at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2005

Something else I've learnt

... is that, in the US, it's possible to hang around a coffee house for seven months then release some fantastic software that makes you rich. Sigh.

This is very encouraging in an abstract way. "Encouraging" as there is some possiblity of success for this mode of operation. "Abstract" as it wasn't me getting rich.

Link courtesy of Daring Fireball.

Posted by Oliver at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

How to be sure you're not invited to the wedding

Well. That's another weekend coming to a close! I had originally planned to attend Aid from Ireland's fundraiser for the Aceh tsunami victims (some readings by Irish authors; Roddy Doyle, Pat McCabe, Conor McPherson & Brendan Gleeson were the ones I was looking forward to) but there doesn't appear to be any tickets left. Shag. So instead I'm here, tapping this out before putting a couple of prints up on on my bedroom walls.

It's as well, really. I'm feeling very drained after my weekend, which began on Friday evening with me making dinner for my sweetheart (who's name I'm not going to tell you, as you'd only laugh. Instead, chuckle/groan at me calling her my sweetheart when blogging). She was Not So Good after her dentist encounter. So: comfort food, including her favourite and mine: mountains of well-made mashed potato. You'd know we were Irish.

Saturday was spent mostly Lounging, with some quality Idling. On Saturday evening we went to a friend's house for some gorgeous home-cooked Chinese food (you'd never guess we were Irish) before heading on to an engagement party.

I've never been to an engagement party before, which might explain some of my inexperience here, but for some reason when it was explained to me that Ely's Wine Bar was a wine bar, I didn't think: Hmmm. Slightly more formal dress than usual, then. My friend seemed slightly put out on seeing me in runners. But still, she seemed pleased that I was there, so that wasn't the Bad Thing I Did.

Background detail: My newly-engaged friend is somebody I'm fond of, and somebody I'm sorry I haven't kept in better touch with. I have no real excuse for this, particularly as she lives right across the road from where I used to work (though I've since moved to a building ten minutes walk away). We were very good friends at one stage or another; she's the first girl I ever kissed, in fact, or at least (as one of my workmates put it) she's the first girl I ever kissed properly.

So. No chance of a shag there then (note to sweetheart: just kidding, and when did you start reading this?). But the Bad Thing I Did wasn't saying that line out loud. No, even I realise that, while I might had a cheeky grin at the memory of saying this a few months later, it was far from the proper time, place, or audience.

No. The Bad Thing I Did was bounding up to my friend's fiancé (who'll we'll call Bill) and addressing him as Frank. Who's Frank? Why, Frank would be my friend's previous boyfriend, and now very definitely her ex! Congratulations, Frank, you're engaged!

Calling your friend's fiancé by the name of your friend's ex is, as the French say, Not To Be Done. To his eternal credit, Bill was in sufficiently great form to tolerate my drunken idiocy and point me in the direction of the free bar. I took his advice, then joined my sweetheart and other friends, all out in force to mark the occasion, and all far better dressed for it than I was.

I quickly realised what a maroon I'd been when my friends referred to the fiancé by his actual name. Cue extensive mortification. But when that was done, and everyone had had a sympathetic laugh or ten, we settled in for a great evening. And it was great. It's fantastic to see people I first met as a student in college in such form: polished, confident, considerate and endlessly good fun to be with. I hope some day to join their ranks. Even more than this, it was great to see my engaged friend so clearly over the moon, and Bill beside her in exactly the same state.

Nevertheless, that level of embarrassment takes a while to fade. I spent today trying to hurry this process along, but it's not quite done yet. For penance, this evening I man-handled our (fake) Christmas tree out of it's stand, into it's constituent parts, and into what must have been a box at one time but has now become so battered and worn that it's probably best described as cardboard wrapping. This was lots of fun, it turns out, as work for me usually involves tapping at a keyboard. It was good to do some work that involved genuine work. There was some actual lugging at one stage.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. I've been playing with a hammer for the past few minutes and I mean to continue in the 'genuine work' vein by banging some picture hooks into my bedroom walls.

Posted by Oliver at 08:20 PM | Comments (2)

What have I learned?

I've learnt that Movable Type doesn't support the word-processor style buttons for styling text in these posts when you're using Safari on Mac OS X, that's what I've learned.

And that I'm not sure if 'styling' is a real word.

Regardless, one demerit for MT.

Postscript: They work fine in Camino, Mac OS X's Firefox equivalent. Hmf. Also: if you're not using Firefox and you are using Windows, give Firefox a go. It's the internet without the fiddly bits.

Posted by Oliver at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2005

WARNING: may contain tooth traces

Those of you with delicate constitutions, a history of dental problems or a debilitating fear of dentists should probably stop reading now.

My significant other today had the horrendous experience of biting into a Toffee Crisp, to discover that she might be in with a chance of suing Nestlé for billions. As she chewed, a hard shard of what felt like glass seemed to have come along with the standard toffee & crisp. Some cautious chewing later, the picture was less rosy: a piece of her own tooth, calmly and with no pain, had completely detached itself to swim around in her mouth.

Cue much cursing of poor childhood dental hygiene (why didn't I learn to flip my skull open like that man on the Reach ads? Why?!) and a series of terrifying mental images of what the dentist would do once he or she got inside her mouth.

In the end though, it wasn't that bad. After a lot of poking around with primitive metal objects (conducted by a man with a horrified expression, apparently) a series of appointments were scheduled, beginning next week. But some changes still have to be made, diet-wise, which can be neatly summarised as No More Sugar.

So it was funny to come back to her desk, after seeing the dentist, to find the remainder of the toffee crisp carefully sellotaped into its wrapper for when she felt she could safely eat again. This is a girl who likes her chocolate. If I had been the cause of a broken tooth, even inadvertently and without pain, I would never have been let forget it. But if you're chocolate-coated, you can do no wrong.

Posted by Oliver at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

Automating monotony

You'd think, for someone with a computer science postgrad, that I would have a good grip on how to, y'know, make software. Not to mention the various bits and pieces that make that process easier, like some system to keep track of different versions and changes made. An invisible archivist. CVS, for example. But, me being me, I'm not the type to download the most popular version and get started without thinking twice about it. Oh no. Instead, why not read about it, find out if it's really that good, and get a list of alternatives together? That way, rather than having something actually up and running, boredom will set in and I'll start doing something else. Right.

Then the excellent Rui Carmo of The Tao of Mac put up a great list of open source apps to 'watch' (or whatever the equivalent activity of keeping track of applications as they develop is called). On them is the intriguing Monotone CVS analogue (though it's peer-to-peer rather than client-server) and I'm sold. I'm a P2P kind of guy, after all. Plus it ties in with current project ideas.

Of course, when I say 'sold' I mean I downloaded and printed off their manual. But I've bound it and everything! Look at the shiny cover!

Posted by Oliver at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2005

Applephilia

Oooh oooh oooh! Apple yesterday unveiled a plethora of new and exciting objects to those who find Apple objects exciting. Of whom I am one! Note to self: you don't need any of these shiny new things. Though that new small Mac Mini looks nice. And would be great for your parents. And might stop them bugging you about getting the computer working. Nor do you need that new iPod Shuffle, no matter how small and smart it is. Your existing iPod works just fine. Even if it is getting on slightly. You've already treated yourself for getting the Masters, even if that little selection hasn't arrived yet. Stop it.

Posted by Oliver at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2005

Urgent sugar ingestion

I've just consumed the contents of a small but vividly blue bag of Starburst Joosters, one selection of the selection box traditionally given to me by my parents for Christmas, though I've only gotten around to tearing off the wrapping paper this evening. There were eleven jelly beans in the bag. Eleven! If I'd realised how highly Masterfoods must prize their jelly beans, I wouldn't have crammed the last six into my mouth all at once like that.

Posted by Oliver at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)

Candidates should not repeat material already used

Tonight I discovered I have no moral obligation to keep my photocopied notes from the college I left five years ago. I realised this by reading an exam question from an old exam paper, one I apparently answered, on The Crucible. If you had asked me earlier if I'd read or seen this play I would have said no. Mind you, not having experienced the play in its entirety probably wouldn't have stopped my trying to answer a question on it. In my finals. I think I once wrote a quote for a president of the students' union condemning the college for cutting the study time students had before their exams, as, in the case of final year students, they were the most important exams they would ever take. Clearly even I didn't really buy this.

With the exam paper were some old college photocopies which I'd put to one side after leaving college, believing that (presumably trying to feel better about completely failing to take my degree seriously) I would read them someday. For my own amusement. Because, after all, they did look kind of interesting. They've been sitting in my room for five years now. And now they're sitting in the recycle bin. Under my bed there are alot more bundles of paper that are going to share the same fate. It seems a kind of release will follow this act; the prospect of such a release makes me giddy.

Posted by Oliver at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2005

Please please please, let me...

I'm sitting at a generously sized desk, surrounded by midriff-high grey parition walls upholstered in some unidentifiable synthetic material. You can push at them to feel a layer of foam underneath the cloth. Paper can be attached to the walls with push-pins but the pins don't reliably keep their grip in the foam.

On my desk are a number of documents which I am supposed to be summarising, but as yet I've only done a handful. I've no direction at the moment, at least not career-wise, and this collection of notes is going to push me to finding out why. I've already lied at least once, you see. I do have a direction I want to go, career-wise. I'm daunted by what it'll take to pursue it.

Posted by Oliver at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

Brand new interface, same lack of content

Moveable Type 3.14! Bright! Shiny! New!

Posted by Oliver at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2005

Astrology

Astrology

Astrology

 

In a region now desert in modern-day southern Turkey, aerial photography hinted at geometric patterns and regularities not ordinarily found in nature. Freshly revealed by random wind patterns and increasing aridity, the patterns interrupted the natural lie of the land and suggested the influence of ancient humanity. The positions and estimated age of these traces led to theories of the existence of another Neolithic community far from the warrens of Catal Huyuk, the city of vulture-worship founded in 7000 B.C. Excited by reports of these from his colleagues, and by articles in the archaeological journals, a young professor assembled a team of local experts to explore these mysteries more fully. Previous expeditions had failed: the desert, desolate, not overbearingly hot but without water, was inimical to the activities of men. Working under such conditions without success in the short term was discouraging. It was also said that there was an oppressive air about the place, a sense of eternal stillness that stifled the archaeological zeal of those sifting through gravel for clues of a past forgotten for millennia.

 

It was not in the nature of the professor to allow the past to remain forgotten. His parents were wealthy and inclined to support their only son. Their friends, also wealthy, knew the world did not always remember the names of the rich. They knew too that patrons of such expeditions in the past had attained some manner of reflected glory. If the expedition was unsuccessful, what of it? They lost only money, which they were expert at accumulating, and gained the esteem of the professor’s family, respected and influential in their circle. Their sponsorship was graciously accepted.

 

The desert was stubborn. The professor’s team splintered, and some months after their arrival only the professor and a depleted core of four others remained to work the excavation site. He had stayed despite the desert’s forbidding nature, despite the scepticism of his peers, and despite the comfortable life waiting for him back at home, until he had stayed so long he was there because of everything encouraging him to leave. What fool would spend so much money on a dream in the desert for months on end, to return empty-handed? He could not leave. His money seemed to spend itself, day by day, and he knew if he stayed there much longer his pride would never allow him to return to the derision gathering for him at home. He worked on.

 

The desert was vast, and he could only choose the most promising selection of those hints to excavate. Each hint turned out to yield nearly nothing - tantalising fragments of stone not native to the area, or unidentifiable organic residue long ossified by the transformation of swampland to desert by the passing centuries. But no human remains, no shards of pottery, no concrete artefacts of ancient human life.

 

Then, one day, a strange occurrence. He found a patch of darker earth that, when excavated in layers, revealed a circle bordered by stone. It was a deliberate arrangement. He sent samples to be dated, but found little else close by.

 

A week later, another circle, and the delivery of a sketch of an image found in Catal Huyuk, sent by a friend. The people of that city never developed writing, instead displaying scenes of their life, their religious practices, and their goddess on the walls of their religious and civic buildings. How they lived was necessarily inferred from these images and the ruins they left behind.

 

The sketch showed a human figure dancing in a circle, watched far above by a multitude of tiny single eyes, set apart from each other in patterns he thought to recognise. He sent for books, telescopes, and more money. There were no other sketches like this found in the ruins of Catal Huyuk. He mapped the positions of his two circles and waited impatiently for a response.

 

The sketch haunted him. He had photographs of the image sent to him and pored over them, thinking he detected emotion among the eyes, or agony in the dancer. He knew he was imagining seeing his own frustrations in the images. He routinely fell asleep surrounded by them. The desert worked at him, changing his colour and turning his frame gaunt. He did not sleep well. His sponsors refused more money.

 

The laboratory results returned, declaring the samples to be ancient. The books and telescopes followed, and with these tools he mapped the night sky as it would have been at the time the soil samples were last exposed to the air. He took his sky map, and after hours of deliberation, mapped two of the stars to the circles he had so carefully revealed.

 

Then, to prove his conjecture, he predicted the location of a third circle, in a location he had not thought to dig before. He cajoled his companions into digging there. They had nothing to lose. The professor’s money was soon to be gone, perhaps in as little as a week. They concentrated on the professor’s new site.

 

Incredibly, a new circle was found. His workers displayed a guarded interest.

 

The professor was elated. He had also exhausted his funds. He could not afford to test his conjecture again, and reveal another circle. He knew what he had found ranked only as a curiosity, nothing more, and the best he could hope for was for somebody else to follow up his results, perhaps discover more circles, and share the glory that the professor felt was his, by right. Dismayed at the prospect, and made brash by his discovery, he decided that the entire range of his suppositions, formed during the sleepless nights in the inhospitable desert, were true. He broadcast these despite his companions’ warnings.

 

He had discovered a new people, he declared, with a belief system unlike another other. They predicated the continued existence of the earth on the whim of the stars.

 

The stars were eternal; a human life was a blink of an eye, ephemeral in comparison. It was clear to this people that the stars were incapable of quick action on human terms. They saw what an ant accomplished during its lifetime, and compared this to the destruction a wolf could bring. They looked at themselves and how they had little to fear from even a pack of wolves. On such a scale, what powers did a being as eternal as a star possess? They feared what cataclysms might result from conflict between such gods, and so acted out tales of the folly of war, for fear warring stars would fill the heavens with a fire that would consume the earth.

 

The dancers came to believe that this was why they were put upon the earth. The stars had put them there to act out their conflicts and wars on their behalf; ants playing at the life of the gods. Their stories would appal the stars, driving them to avoiding the course laid out for them by the dancers, they reasoned, and so they inhabited this role completely. They embraced transience. They spurned possessions, beyond what utensils were necessary for their daily existence. They burned their dead, with their survivors crushing those utensils and mixing the dust with the ashes of the departed, then casting the mixture into the swamplands.

 

They danced beneath the stars, telling the classic stories of human life: love, betrayal, conflict, death. The stars spun on overhead, unchanging, constant observers of the tableau played out for their benefit below. The dancers danced to educate the stars, teaching the folly of passion, hoping to keep the gods from war.

 

Perhaps the stars learned the lesson. The people died out, with nothing to show for their beliefs beyond the shadow of their stages on the earth, and millennia of peace in heaven.

 

The world did not believe the professor. Such colourful theories, founded on such evidence, were hard to accept, and the derision he had feared sharpened into outright incredulity. He stayed in Turkey, growing old, refusing the entreaties of his family, inhabiting a country he did not love, rising at dawn, eating basic food, staring deliberately, obsessively, at the same eternal rock and sand, retiring at dusk, repeating the same pattern, day in, day out. He thought of his ancient civilisation, staring at that land, seeking through repetition to compress his life into a single, expressible, unchanging thought; the one thought he had missed his people trying to tell him.

 

 

Oliver Mooney

April 2005

Posted by Oliver at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

About me: the AWVC whistle-stop tour

Hey there! I’m Oliver, a minor public official with ambitions my life to date has failed to justify. I’m Irish, born in Dublin in 1976, and still living there.

This is my own corner of the web. I’ve a selection of interests so the website is set up accordingly, in case those of you interested in reading the Gadgetry entries have no interest in the Ephemera or Random word collisions sections:

Ephemera
Day-to-day accounts of events of little importance to anyone, really, though I think it’ll be fun to read them back to myself in later years.

Gadgetry
Despite what my girlfriend might tell you, I’m not a massive purchaser of handy little electronic doodads that I foolishly imagine will make my life easier. I’m not!

Er, that said, I do have a small collection I’m quite fond of. Among these are:

See? Not that many. The thing is, having more than one gadget means wanting to get all of these gadgets talking to each other. The Apple stuff works together perfectly, (though I used to use XPlay so I could drag stuff from the internet home to my Mac from work). So, any new gadgets have to work with all the old gadgets I have. This network effect is what stopped me using the Revo, though it’s a fantastic piece of hardware, as there’s no chance it and the iBook will ever start talking to each other. Hopefully in the future gadget makers will think about interoperability more. At the moment Palm, Symbian, Mac OS X, and Windows are essentially walled gardens once you want to do more than just synchronise contacts. Bluetooth does help, of course.

Anyway. Entries in this category are reviews of gadgets and tales of my experiences when using them.

GayMing
Man, I didn’t realise it at the time, but my parents buying my family a Commodore 64 when I was twelve years old changed my life. I mean, presumably I would’ve encountered games eventually if I hadn’t at that point. But playing them at such a young age wasn’t all that common for my generation. Some of my friends have never gotten the hang of using a control mechanism to move an on-screen character, as they can’t stop staring at the controller… hmmm. Remind me never to let those people drive me anywhere.

Over the years I or other family members have owned:

We had 300 games for the 64 at one stage. I’m fairly sure that’s more than all the games we have for the rest of the systems combined. But then, you could buy games for the Commodore on impulse; the budget games only cost three or four pounds. If you want me to start ranting, ask what I think about budget games costing thirty euro today.

Entries in this section are articles about games, game systems, and my experiences and memories of them.

Homebrew
A catch-all category for creative stuff that doesn’t handily fall into the next two categories.

Random word collisions
I used to be quite an avid writer for college newspapers and literary magazines. If I ever get round to it, I’ll put a selection of these up here. I also have the fond hope of writing something new, at some unspecified point in the future.

Soft software
I’m something of a bedroom coder, and though I’ve never programmed for money, I do have pet fantasies about setting up my own software company, being riotously successful, and winding up so rich enough to never have to be put on hold for anything. Yeah, me and the rest of the internet, I know… I did run my own games company for a year, before having to fire myself.

Various software projects will be discussed here.

Steam valve
Ventings.

And that’s Award-winning virtual classroom, in a large roomy nutshell.

Posted by Oliver at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack