The Story of the Fleeble Widget

A proper, grown-up person's blog

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:17:04 GMT

I got me one of those. http://fleeblewidget.co.uk/.

There will be no more updates here.

Guys! Guess What??!?!

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:06:10 GMT

I got married!

I have a husband!

He is awesome. And no, you can't have him.

Unless you happen to be a cute girl and definitely not crazy and you promise to give him back.

But the key thing here is, yay! Husband!

The Shoe Quest and Things That Make Me Smile

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:33:29 GMT

This has been a trying week. Aside from the fact that we're getting to the stage of wedding prep where everything we haven't done yet is really scary (oh God, why haven't we sorted stationery or a sound system yet?!), there's been The Great Shoe Quest.

Earlier in the summer, when I had my first wedding dress fitting, Harriet (JTA's sister) was kind enough to accompany me on a gruelling trawl through every shop on Oxford Street that sells shoes. We must have seen thousands of shoes, but we didn't find any that met my requirements (not helped by the fact that this summer's must-have trend was apparently 'bulbous, gem-encrusted growths'). After some work scouring online forums and such, I hit on what seemed like the perfect solution: I needed shoes that would look good, but be comfy enough to wear all day - what about tango dance shoes? I found an online retailer with a great selection of dance shoes, found a pair I liked and placed an order. Then I waited for them to be delivered, which was supposed to take two to three weeks (a bit of a gamble given than my dress fitting was less than three weeks away).

When the shoes didn't arrive in time for my fitting, I took a pair that were the same heel height and told myself it would be fine.

Fast forward to last week. It had been two months since I ordered the shoes, and not only had they not arrived yet, I hadn't heard a peep out of the company who were supposed to be supplying them. I sent them a reasonably friendly email to ask what was going on, and was told that the manufacturers had sent them in the wrong colour originally but that they would definitely be in the post by Friday and they'd email me to confirm once they were on their way.

On Tuesday, four days after they were definitely definitely going to be in touch, and with no further word, I wrote them back to explain that I must have them by Saturday (my final dress fitting), and warning that if the shoes were not already in the post I would have to cancel my order. They emailed back to say they'd refunded my money.

Now, whilst this did mean I wasn't out of pocket, it also left me with no shoes and only three days to find some. Accordingly, I've spent most of this week looking at shoes. On Tuesday, JTA and I spent well over an hour looking at every shoe in Bicester Outlet Village. I found a pair of reserve shoes (not ideal, but will do if I can't find anything better), and a very jazzy hat. Yesterday lunchtime, I was out of the office for two hours looking at pretty much every shoe in the whole of Oxford. Still nothing. All I want is a gold shoe with a one-inch heel, a strap and no open toe. Is that so much to ask for?

So anyway, after work I'm going back into Oxford and I'm planning on buying these shoes (which I previously viewed and rejected), assuming I can convince myself that I don't mind the weird flower things.

Which is a very long-winded way of explaining why I'm feeling tired, footsore and dispirited. The fact it's been raining all day isn't helping - I have to go out and look at shoes again, dammit!

However, I can't really feel sad for too long, because the world is full of things that make me smile:

* The little 'ping' noise the light in the hallway at work makes as it very slowly flickers on or off (I think the bulbs going). I don't know why, but it seems like a really happy noise, as if the light is saying "Bing! I'm back!"

* My awesome new hat. It's purple. 'Nuff said. I wanted to wear it to the wedding, but then I remembered that I already have a tiara and it is 4000 times more sparkly.

* Playing Rocky Horror songs on Guitar Hero 6. It's hard not to smile when strumming along to 'Sweet Transvestite'.

* JTA, especially the look he gives me when I've said something stupid. It's a look that says "you're a chump, and I love you just the way you are". I've never seen him look at anyone else that way. It's my special look.

* Dan, and the way he smiles when I catch him off-guard with an affectionate moment.

* Having Paul around.

And many, many more. Happytimes!

The simplest questions are the hardest

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:57:03 GMT

Many of our customers are engineers or mathematicians first, and programmers a distant second. They often make mistakes which strike a qualified software engineer like myself as laughable (they'd be less downright amusing if they fixed them themselves rather than writing in to ask for help). Recently, someone reported a bug in our memory checker because it was telling him he had a leak and he couldn't see one. Turns out he was re-allocating a pointer repeatedly in a loop, but not deallocating it until after the loop terminated. Yep, that's a bug, but not in our code.

Sometimes, though, I get floored by questions which are so basic that I almost can't answer them. Right now, I'm pouring through the Fortran standard trying to find anything at all which says that variable names appearing inside strings won't be substituted for the value of the variable (eg my_string="hi"; something_else="that was my_string" - wouldn't expect my_string inside the literal to become "hi") - so far, no success. I hope they actually put it in there...

Not listening anymore

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 15:50:22 GMT

I've just sent off an email to Oxford Samaritans explaining that I won't be re-joining them, and outlining some of the things which made it difficult for me to get involved with the branch when I transferred there from Aberystwyth, in hopes that the next person will have an easier time of it.

I'm feeling... all kinds of things. Although I've already set things in motion to start volunteering with a different organisation (there's rather more choice round here!), Samaritans holds a special place in my heart and the fact that I'm not one of them anymore is kind of devastating. It feels like the path I started down in October 2003 with such hope and pride has come to an abrupt and ignominious end.

I'm also questioning my own motives in providing feedback. It's pretty easy to tell myself that I just wanted them to learn from my experiences, and to help make life easier for the next guy. But, with a gnawing feeling of self-loathing and shame, I'm rather afraid that somewhere in the back of my mind I wanted them to read my comments and suggestions and think "wow, this person really knows a lot about being a Samaritan and we completely failed her!". This was good-bye forever, and yet I still wanted them to think well of me. Which is odd, because usually when I tell people to push off out of my life I couldn't care less how they feel about it. I suppose this is because I really liked being a Samaritan and I didn't want it to end this way. *sigh*

In other news, we were visited by roughly one kerjillion trick-or-treaters yesterday, mostly in big scary gaggles. We had to do an emergency re-supply, despite having laid in four bags of little chocolate bars. Turns out there are loads of children living in our area. Either that, or one very enterprising group with lots of costume changes.

Also we watched Ghostwatch. It was scary. I slept very badly last night.

Time travel and mobile phones

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 08:20:29 GMT

Granted, I haven't watched the clip, but really? I doubt that the footage a guy from Belfast found of someone in the 1920s apparently talking on a mobile phone is evidence of time travel.

First off, surely there are other reasons someone might be touching their ear?

Secondly, what use is a mobile phone without the infrastructure to allow you to use it? You could argue that perhaps the woman is from the far future, and using some freaky future technology which doesn't require masts and cables and big computers, but if so, how likely is it that the futuristic device would be something you hold up against your ear? The trend is towards smaller and smaller devices, often ones you can just plug in to your ear and forget about, and I don't see that reversing in the distant future.

Sorry, I just don't buy it.

An observation which I can't make on the wedding blog

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:01:28 GMT

Getting married is a lot of work.

Ok, I generalise; if we weren't having a non-standard ceremony followed by a fairly lavish reception, all half-way across the country from where we actually live, and choosing to do a lot of the fiddly bits ourselves, then it would undoubtedly be less work. As it is, there are things to do. Plenty of them.

Everyone knows this, though. You can have simple weddings, and you can have cheap weddings, but our cultural sub-concious tells us that in general, weddings are expensive and require a lot of work.

The thing that's surprised me is just how much of that work consists of finding things for other people to do, and then holding their hands while they do them. I've just spent 40 minutes on the phone to my mother talking about cupcake decorations, and closer to the day we'll be spending hours and hours making them, just so that she can point to a part of the day and say "I did that bit". I'm blessed in the fact that my family want to help out, and I really am grateful that they're excited about my big day. But I'm also exhausted from finding tangible ways in which they can help out.

And don't get me started on the politics of making sure that they've all got equally important tasks...

Owning your views

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:15:04 GMT

Here's another thing that's bugging me. As a Christian, it upsets me so much to be labelled 'the enemy' in so many debates over liberal values (gay marriage, abortion, etc ad infinitum). I can't tell you how crushing it is to read things like this week's Savage Love and find myself under attack from people I like and respect because other people of my religion hold views different to their own. This is not least because I am on their side. I am pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, generally pro-letting-people-make-up-their-own-minds-about-their-lives and anti-stopping-people-doing-stuff-just-because-they're-not-like-us.

Here's a thought that struck me today; I don't usually go in for chucking blame around in these cases, but I don't think it's really the fault of Dan Savage or anyone else who's ever accused all Christians of being illiberal jerks (NB Richard Dawkins aside - I can't stand that guy!). It's not their fault because my fellow Christians brought it down on all our heads. How? By saying that they are homophobic because they're Christians. If loud-mouthed, judgemental reactionaries decide to justify their opinions as being rooted in their religious beliefs, then it's not surprising that the people they are crusading against will come to think that only bigots follow that religion.

Once you look at it in this light, it's pretty clear that this is total balls. Sure, some religions are crazy proscriptive and will tell you what to think, what to wear, who to give all your money to and which suicide method to use, but Christianity is not one of them. It's a massive, ambiguous mess of tradition, custom, mythology, warring factions and hopelessly tangled scripture. That's one of the reasons I'm a Christian, actually - I'm pretty sure that my particular beliefs can be slotted in there somewhere. To point at this crazy-paving of a belief system and claim that it absolutely forbids gay people from getting married in clear and unmistakable language is like pretending you can read messages in silly string.

I'm not going to say that which religion you belong to is a choice. This was the case for me, but I don't think it always is. However, a religion ought to be a moral framework. Choosing one, therefore, ought to work around your personal ethics and what 'feels right'. If you genuinely feel that Christianity forbids gay marriage, but you yourself don't have a problem with gay marriage, then perhaps, just perhaps, Christianity isn't the religion for you?

This all amounts to a very long-winded way of saying something simple: I can't come up with a single compelling counter-argument to the position that people who say that they can't support gay marriage because they are Christian are really saying that they don't want to support gay marriage and being Christian is their excuse.

Sticking to your guns when you're sure you're right - even in the face of condemnation and derision - is admirable, and even if I'm sure you're wrong I will respect your views. Personal morals are complicated, and in the end, you can't help how you feel. But trying to hide behind my religion? Not ok.

A question to which I don't know the answer

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:29:27 GMT

Today, in between many, many other things, I had debate with a friend of a boyfriend about explicit versus general acceptance, viz, the relative merits of saying that you are tolerant of gays/bisexuals/catholics/etc against just saying that you are tolerant and leaving it at that. Or even not bothering to say it and expecting or hoping that people will realise that's the case.

Aside from the discovery that Katie has my all time favourite XKCD comic up on her profile, this set me thinking about something, and no matter how much I turn this over in my mind, I can't come up with an answer:

Why isn't it ok to say you're proud to be straight?

I, of course, am neither straight nor particularly proud. But what's with this double standard that says you can be proud to be part of a minority but you should be ashamed to be part of the majority? What's so shameful about being straight? Or, to put it another way, why can't you just be happy that you're gay, and think it's the best thing for you, without putting it in terms that suggest you think you'd be less happy if you were anything else?

Anyone know?

Java, I hate you

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:01:38 GMT

Auto-boxing and unboxing isn't a bad idea - since Java behaves in odd ways at the boundary between primitive types and proper objects, why not simply have it magically convert one into the other behind the scenes as needed? Great!

However, the implementation of this great idea is half-arsed and ragged around the edges. For example, today I spent some time trying to figure out why I couldn't call the toArray method on a vector of doubles. Turns out this is because the Vector can only be built out of objects, so java helpfully turned double[] into Double[] for me when constructing the vector. However, when it comes time to go the other way, java doesn't feel like helping so I have to call toArray with Double as my argument. Which is fine, but now I have an array of Double and what I actually need is double. Which would also be fine, except this just happened:

./uk/co/nag/E02/E02bez.java:202: inconvertible types
found   : java.lang.Double[]
required: double[]
                                 (double[])h.toArray(new Double[h.si

Inconvertible? Really? That's breathtakingly aggravating.

What's extra annoying is that I'm currently hand-coding a java translation of one of our routines for a client in the banking sector, and all this pissing about translating one thing to another, with all the extra method calls, is likely to mean it ends up being slower than simply writing a wrapper around the Fortran version of the same code. Stupid language. I blame universities for making it popular. What's so wrong with C, people?

Small dishonesty

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:57:19 GMT

This morning I found myself waiting for the kettle to boil in company with Kat, who works on reception. She's nice enough, and I always say hello when I go past in the morning, but we don't know each other all that well. We made friendly small talk about the weather and such-like. And I concealed the truth from her.

I was relating an anecdote about something that happened on Earth this week, and I started with "One of my housemates...". Now, it's true that I do share my house with other people, but a more accuracte description would be 'boyfriends'. The thing is, we were talking about the colder weather which has settled over Oxford, and I was enjoying the conversation. My experience to date suggests that a phrase like "One of my boyfriends..." immediately changes the topic.

I don't mind that people are curious about my somewhat unorthodox domestic situation. I don't mind answering friendly questions about our lives. I just wish that it was possible to mention it in passing, rather than have it become a talking point.

Every time I refer to my men as less than they really are, it feels dishonest; like a small betrayal of who I am and of the people who make me happy. I don't know if it's me that's the problem or the rest of the world, but I wish it didn't have to be this way. Mind you, polyamoury is gaining momentum and visibility; maybe there will come a time when no-one will care how many life-partners I have, and I can relate stories about mundane things from our lives without fear of interruption. I hope so, anyway.

Some good things

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:29:25 GMT

It seems like I only ever blog when something really big happens or when I'm unhappy. This is because I primarily use my blog to vent, these days - it's become less a chronicle of my life and more a way of letting off steam. To redress the balance a little bit, here are some good things that are going on:

I have the love of two wonderful men. I can't overstate how happy my new domestic arrangements make me; I couldn't wish for a happier family than the one we've forged together in Oxford. We have our little problems, and we're still working on making sure this works for all of us, but I like living with Dan and JTA and I like where we're living.

I planted some lavender in the garden at the weekend. This is the first step towards cultivating the ramshackle patch of earth which I hope to make into a lovely, peaceful space. There's something wonderfully permanent feeling about working on the garden; I've never had a garden of my own before, and this is the first time in a long while that I've felt like I might be able to stay where I am for long enough that it's worth putting effort into improving my surroundings.

We went punting last week. It's harder than it looks, but we had a fun time zig-zagging down the Cherwell. It felt Oxfordy, and was a welcome reminder that we can still be childish and chilled out here, for all that we're now pretending to be grown-ups.

Wedding stuff! I'm getting so over-excited about the wedding time. I'm done panicking, and I'm confident that everything will be sorted in time (even if we have to make some compromises along the way). I've managed to shake the mindset of holding everything against some hypothetical 'perfect' wedding and finding it wanting, and I'm much happier for it.

Despite all that, I still feel like I'm falling to bits right now. But it'll pass; it always does. It's just that I don't usually bother to say so on here. Sorry about that.

:(

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:15:48 GMT

Today I am writing Java. And that's not even the low point of my day.

*sigh*

All alone in the biggest room in the world

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:58:05 GMT

Does anyone else feel awed and scared when they type the error they're getting into google and get no results? I wouldn't say the internet is my first resort when trying to solve technical problems, but once I've exhausted the obvious lines of enquiry I generally have a poke around to see what other people in the same situation have said.

Sometimes, and increasingly often since I started at NAG again, no-body has ever said anything about it. It makes me feel alone.

Murder and Magic and Muffins

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:51:10 GMT

I'm not so good at updating lately, for a variety of reasons to do with being crazy busy and also having wounded two fingers (more on that on the wedding blog at some point).

However, I thought I'd say a few words about the house-warming party we held to celebrate Paul's arrival on Earth (thus completing the relocation that began a whole year ago when I first moved over to Oxford at the end of last summer).

Dan had once again written a murder mystery for us. With 13 major characters and a handful of additional minor characters, it was our most complex and challenging one yet. I decided to make a cold buffet, on the grounds that I wouldn't have a clue about the plot if I was cooking for 20 during the evening itself. Consequently, I started cooking on Thursday evening, worked solidly all through Saturday and Sunday, and finished the last bit of prep 20 minutes before the start of the party on Sunday evening. Honorable mention should be made at this point of Finbar, Liz and Simon, who turned up early and were a massive help in getting all the food finished on time. Simon earned millions of points by clearing a big stack of washing up. Sadly, these didn't count towards his score for the mystery game or he would have easily won the evening...

As usual, things were a little awkward as we settled in and started the party off. This time round, they were more awkward than normal since half a dozen of the guests were delayed at the hospital with Becky's friend Zara, who had suffered an asthma attack (but was later observed smoking a ciggy and deemed to be recovering!). Consequently, we had a longer than usual bit of hanging around and making small talk while Dan frantically shuffled characters to allow us to start when his mum and her partner arrived, Becky having elected to wait at the hospital.

Dan had tweaked the free-form format slightly since Murder in Space, so we started by introducing ourselves and revealing a couple of clues. There were a few additions to the format that I really liked this time, like the fact that some clues were in other languages which only a handful of characters could translate (although in my case, when I asked for clues to be translated I never got them back...). Things quickly became hectic, with everyone rushing around following up leads, forming alliances and trying to winkle information or plot items out of each other. One particular highlight for me was the very dramatic scene where the college librarian (Finbar) confronted one of the staff (Andy R) about his misappropriation of funds, bellowing "Tworings!" across a crowded room to get his attention. Fantastic! Sadly, the librarian paid for his bravery and deductive prowess with his life, becoming the murderer's second victim of the night. As a librarian fan, I found this deeply tragic.

At the end, it turned out that the person who I suspected (and made such a convincing case against that others suspected him too) was not the murderer, and we executed an innocent man. And I failed in my objective of making sure that I came top in Potions. Unsurprisingly, Liz got the most points, having achieved all but one of her objectives. The real murderer failed to get elected to the newly vacant post of Dean, which was all he wanted, so it was all a lovely lesson in the futility of life and how crime doesn't pay. Or something.

The important thing is, everyone was nice about the food. The 'magic' idea that I'd had for drinks didn't work out so well - I had this great plan to fill glasses with frozen fruit juice ice-cubes in a variety of colours, and then add clear spirits and mixers. My theory was that all the ice-cubes melted they would produce pretty swirls of colour. It didn't work out that way, at least partly because the only colours we managed were red and yellow and the resulting concoction came out an unpleasant fleshy pink after a surprisingly short time. On the plus side, we had plenty of drink and after the murder was over many guests stayed around chatting and hanging out. The party ended up lasting until around 2am.

Monday I felt incredibly ill. I'd drunk way, way too much booze on top of deliberately dehydrating myself whilst cooking (to minimize bathroom trips) and spent quite a lot of the morning throwing up. The folks who were still around made an expedition to the Victoria Arms, our adopted local (there are closer pubs but they aren't as nice), and ate lunch together. I managed to pick at some food, and by the time we got home I felt almost normal again. As we waved each group off, I felt grateful for the people we know and the fact that they continue to come through for us when we want to indulge in these crazy activities. Thanks so much to everyone who came down for the party, I had an amazing time and I think Earth is now very definitely Home.

Everything that's wrong with modern Fortran

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:57:21 GMT

I'm sure that the geeks reading this are probably thinking "isn't that an oxy-moron?", but they're wrong. These days, Fortran has many of the features you need to program in a modern style, including such new-fangled ideas as object-orientation, parallel processing and pointer manipulation.

The problem, really, is its age. Not that Fortran is really a creaking behemoth; old-school code written in Fortran 66 or Fortran 77 was so simple that very little has had to be deprecated from the old standards - even the much-reviled computed goto will still compile. However, there is a desire amongst the committee members who control where the language goes to make it look familiar to existing Fortran developers, and that is where it all goes wrong. For example, the (soon to be finalised) draft standard for Fortran 2003) allows you to write code that looks like this:

  character(:), allocatable :: s

Care to guess what that little snippet does? I'll give you a clue, it's declaring a variable, but of what type?

Well, here's the equivalent from Java:

  String s;

Yep, the concept of strings has finally come to Fortran. And they made it look like some kind of hellish devil-code. What that little beauty up there means is "I'm declaring an array of characters, but I'm not going to say at this point how long it will be. And I want it to be able to change size after it's first assigned". Which is one way of defining a string, and has the big advantage of reusing existing keywords, but is completely alien to people who have learnt to program in other languages.

Which is why Fortran will probably never shake its image as fusty, out-moded and unsuited for modern programming.

Invitations

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:15:15 GMT

In other news, if you haven't yet received your invitation to our wedding, that's because we haven't finished making them. I know some people have been discreetly enquiring as to whether they might have got lost in the mail, but the truth is we've been very busy with the house move and various other things, and we're behind on making cards. Unless you have some other reason to think we might have stopped liking you, don't let it worry you - they should be out this month.

Mind you, we've been saying that every month since June...

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:19:11 GMT

So when does a general feeling of dissatisfaction and malaise cross the line into out-and-out depression? About 15 minutes ago, I think.

Don't let it worry you. I expect I'll start to feel better when I leave the office.

Edit: Although I don't usually redact things, the last-sentence of this was unusually whiny and self-serving even by my standards. So I cut it.

Faking the smarts

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:16:54 GMT

It's time for me to admit something that I have always kept secret. I don't really know why; maybe I'm maturing. Maybe my mind is disintegrating under the weight of all the doubts about my career. Maybe I'm so bored I'd say anything. Maybe I want to practice my one-handed typing (I'm getting pretty fast).

Whatever the reason, projecting an altered image of myself is becoming less and less important to me. I'm ceasing to care whether I appear likeable, fun or in any way normal. A symptom of that is that I am choosing to come clean about something:

I'm not really all that smart.

I think the reason I've been faking it for all this time is that, for a long time, I thought I was unusually intelligent. I attended a small primary school and a smaller secondary school and in both I had no trouble in rising to the top (or near it) of the class. My self-image was 'smart but socially awkward', and it was a cosy (albeit one-dimensional) place to be.

When I went away to university and discovered that I was actually about average in terms of brain power, I didn't know how to construct a new persona out of that and I didn't really want to try. So I developed a work ethic, and learnt to really work hard (you guys wouldn't believe how little work I did for my GCSEs and A-levels). That allowed me to cling to my illusions a little longer.

Now, though, I've decided it just isn't important whether anyone thinks I'm brainy. I admit that I'm not totally sure of the definitions of some of the words I use. I'm done getting insecure and jealous if someone calls a mutual friend 'clever'. Also, I'm not too proud to admit that this post arose because I was going to write something else and I experienced a twinge of doubt over whether 'corollary' meant what I thought it did (turns out it doesn't). See how even my inspiration for writing a post about being less smart than I pretend is a bit dumb? I never admitted it in a public forum before, but I only got a first by a couple of marks and of my year, 6 out of 8 students got firsts.

In other news, they've changed the bbc news website. I don't like it. That could just be reactionarynessism, though.

My embarrasing ailment

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:37:25 GMT

I have a medical condition which severely impacts my ability to live a normal life. Most of the time it's in remission and I can mingle into the crowd, laughing and joking with my peers and pretending I'm just like them. Other times, such as now, it halves my productivity and makes it impossible for me to carry out many everday activities. And yet, when people ask what's wrong, I always answer "Oh, it's only RSI, nothing serious".

This attitude is one of the reasons I've never been to a doctor, and never taken a sick day even when I couldn't type painlessly with either hand. Even though it's taken me the best part of half an hour (and counting) to type this, I'm a little afraid that you're all thinking "RSI? Huh. What's she making such a fuss about?" I don't know if it's because there are no visible symptoms, or because attacks are brought on by nothing more strenous than typing, but I honestly feel like it isn't real. It's as if the shooting pains in my elbow, the dull ache that works its way up to my collarbone and across my shoulders as the attack progresses, the nauseating jolts from my wrists and the tingling numbness in my fingers are all punishments for being a bit lame and I don't want anyone to know.

Most of all I hate how feeble I get. Yesterday, the boys and I went to the supermarket for a weekly shop. I followed them around pathetically, weakly murmuring that we should buy vegetables and being emo about whether I wanted cake, and then I sat on a bench while they packed the shopping into bags.

Another example: at lunch today I discovered that it's almost impossible to eat soup left-handed*. And I had to butter my bread by peeling back as much of the foil as possible and then desperately smooshing the packet against the bread. It didn't work very well, so I tried to fold the bread round the butter-lump to make it look like that was my intention all along. There's nothing like a lunch of half a bowl of soup and a squished-bread mutant-dumpling to make you re-evaluate your life in a harsher light.

Is RSI a legitimate medical problem? Maybe. But that doesn't stop me feeling like a total idiot and wanting to hide it from people. Perhaps other people would take it more seriously if I treated it like a "real" issue, but it seems more likely to me that they would laugh at me/consider me pompous/hate me/all of the above.

When my RSI is bad, I am no use to anyone because I can't carry anything and I can't think about anything much other than 'dammit, pain SUCKS' (exception: once every four hours I pause to meditate on how great codeine is). I think you should just prop me in a cupboard until my arms work again.

*Unless you're left-handed, I guess. But why would a left-handed person be eating soup??

On Sharing

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:19:38 GMT

One of the things we learn early on in life is that sharing is only good if other people also share, right? After all, if I give half my pie to Bob, but Bob doesn't share his ice-cream with me, I end up with fewer delicious calories.

Later, we may learn that sharing can be an end in itself. Not only do I get to feel a warm glow when I give Bob some of the pie that he's been eyeing up ever since I unwrapped it, but we can talk about the pie afterwards. The pie becomes a shared experience, something we can both remember fondly, and part of the rich tapestry of nostalgia that binds all the best lifelong friendships.

Things can go wrong, though. If I take a massive share of Bob's ice-cream and give only a tiny bit of my pie, or if Bob feels like he has to give me part of his lunch every day from now on, things can get rocky. Worse, if I give Bob half of my pie and he has nothing of his own to share, tensions may develop even if I have surplus pie and don't mind at all giving some away. And what happens if the pie is worth ten times what the ice-cream is? Or I don't want the ice-cream but feel I have to take it after sharing my pie?

I think a lot of these problems stem from the feeling that if you receive something, you have to give something. Those of you who've attended one of my birthday parties in the past will know that I tend to discourage gift giving just for the sake of it. If you stumble across something you think I'd like, then yay! Stuff! But I think the world would be a better place if we had less of a reciprocity thing going on and were more inclined to giving for the sake of it.

Mind you, I am a bit of a hippy.

I'll admit that presents weren't foremost in my mind when I started this post, though. I've been thinking a lot about polyamoury and what it really means for me, lately. I know that most of the people reading this are monogamous and perfectly happy, but I'm becoming more and more aware of the surprising ways in which poly and...erm... mono? mony? are similar, and the less surprising ways in which they're different. More on that, perhaps, in a later post. Which you don't have to read if you don't want to.

What the hell? We're supposed to be GEEKS!

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:01:35 GMT

Following conversation just occurred between me and a co-worker:

Albert: Are you coming to watch the football?
Me: It's not really my thing.
Albert slightly incredulous: No? But England are playing!
Me: I don't care, sorry.
Albert disappointed: Alright then.

I guess that's where everyone's gone, then. I wondered why the office was so quiet.

Congratulations Jen & Nick!

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:54:50 GMT

So JTA, Dan and I popped over to Belfast this weekend to attend the wedding of the lovely Jen to the equally lovely Nick (who, though this was only the second time I've met him, seems like an all round nice guy and is making Jen very happy which is definitely a good thing). The bad wedding karma which has kept us from our last two weddings was still very much in force; our plane was delayed by nearly an hour, and then we got extremely lost trying to find the hotel and ended up spending quite some time driving round and round Belfast's confusing one way system, and ended up arriving at the Pavilion Bar an hour late.

We were just in time to watch Jen's brother John conducting a non-legally-binding 'alternative' ceremony with joining of hands and vows based on The Prophet which was beautiful and very moving. I understand that the legal stuff happened earlier in the day, but I was glad we made it for the ceremony that the couple had chosen themselves.

Later, there was Ulster Fry for the wedding breakfast, later still chip butties and a chocolate fountain, and all the while a serious amount of booze floating around. It was nice to meet some more of Jen's family, especially her Dad who apparently went to Aber himself back in the day. Jen looked so beautiful, and Nick was very dashing. He sang a song as part of his vows, and later he and his band performed a set (which was amazing, but we couldn't stay to the end because we were exhausted and had to be up early for our return flight). They're such a lovely couple, and I hope they will be extremely happy for a long, long time. Thanks for a great weekend, guys.

The world's youngest authority on Fortran has this to say:

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:30:44 GMT

I have discovered the secret to effectively handling support requests for our Fortran compiler! Nobody really understands the standard, so as long as you sound confident and you can find a paragraph that sorta-kinda backs you up (not hard in a 583-page document), you can persuade people that they've misunderstood the language.

Mind you, some people are just bonkers people trying to do bonkers things. I can understand why you might think you can access a local array from outside its scope by returning a pointer to it (you can't, though), but why in the heck did anyone think it would be a good idea to try and use an array location as the cursor in a 'for' loop?

House

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:34:24 GMT

Oh yeah, and JTA and I are now camped out in our new house. We won't be fully inhabiting it until next week, when we'll have the rest of our stuff and (please, God) a working fridge, but the number of flaws has drastically decreased over this week - the boiler now works, and the kitchen ceiling no longer leaks when you take a shower, for instance. I've only worked a day and a half this week, but I'm already relishing my new 25 minute commute (down from 60-90 minutes). The house is nice enough, but it'll be nicer still when we're all moved in and Dan and later Paul join us. Aberystwyth is so last year - Oxford is where it's at now, ladies and gents.