| Rereading the Wheel of Time |
[Oct. 31st, 2009|03:30 am] |
I've had Robert Jordan's fantasy epic The Wheel of Time sitting in pride of place on my bookshelf and staring at me for quite some time. I hadn't plucked up the will to read it, on the basis that I found it really, really hard to read the books as they were coming out with huge gaps in between (I'd much rather wait until they're finished), and I hadn't felt any urge to reread it in quite some time. However, with it just sitting there, and Robert Jordan dead (*shakes fist at heavens* why?) and the last book coming out soon, one of the reasons not to had vanished. Then, just having those books staring at me and realising how little I remember of the books the first time I read them meant that I caved in to my curiosity and nostalgia and picked up the first one.
( I had forgotten just how amazingly awesome they are... (minor spoilers, nothing that would spoil it seriously for someone who hasn't read it, but might be annoying if you're intending to read it) ) |
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| Exercising and Redecorating |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|09:03 pm] |
My mother decided that she wanted to redecorate the front room some time about a month ago. Since then, the room has been a busy bustle of painting, furniture moving and things being screwed onto walls and ceilings and taken back down again. Finally, we have a lovely sitting room ready again, repainted and looking nice. I got to choose the light fixtures, and they look very nice :)
With the sitting room done, it was possible to connect up the Wii again. I was looking forwards to this, as I'd been dying to get back on Wii Fit.
Wii Fit's strange. Neither me nor my mother use it all the time. I think we both feel that it's not great for keeping fit if it's your only tool. However, both of us seem to like it for different reasons from time to time. It never languishes unsused for more than a month or two.
I like it because there's pretty much no exercise that I can do that's gentle enough if I've done nothing but sit at computers for a week and start feeling stiff and ill because of it. Normal exercise is too strenuous and hurts, but the Wii Fit balance exercises just ease me in to the point where I can start doing Sun Salutations or other exercises again.
The thing that amazes me is that, despite my crap lack of exercise this month, I'm still fitter now than this time last year, and more flexible. Not much, admittedly, but there is improvement, which is so utterly awesome it's beyond words. It's nice to know that I'm doing enough exercise that it's actually building up and not going back to my starting level, and it gives me hope that if I do more, it'll benefit me and not disappear into a void, where all my previous exercise seemed to vanish into.
Yesterday's Wii Fit session also had one last piece of awesomeness: I managed to get 100 pts on Downwards Facing Dog, and my first yoga 100 pts ever. DFD is my favourite yoga pose. It stretches my back, legs and arms, all the places that get used brutally when sitting at a desk, in a lovely simple exercise. |
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| Curry Casserole |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|07:05 pm] |
The weekend before last, for a Sunday dinner, I decided that I would try and make a Curry again. I wanted to make one completely from scratch as I had the time before.
Things did not start well when my mother came back from shopping with shoulder of lamb. That's a stewing cut and not a braising cut, and I had imagined that I would try and do one of those sizzling curries you tend to get more at restaurants. I was left with a bit of a loss about what to do. Mum didn't help as she kept pushing me to use a sauce.
Anyway, I tried to rise to the challenge. I figured that, in those areas of the Indian subcontinent where they eat meat, they must also try and makes stews with the leftover parts of animals that are not suitable for anything else. With that in mind for inspiration, I tried to do something.
I fried off the meat using some chilli and garlic and cumin seeds, which seemed safe enough to use in a curry. I then did the same with onions and peppers. Finally, I took the leftover juices in the pan and took all the tomatoes that we had grown in the garden and mixed them together with a bit of water to make a tomato sauce. I added the spices necessary to make a Rogan Josh style curry at the beginning, but I thought that it wouldn't go so well, and changed half-way through to make more of a balti-style curry sauce, as I figured the more delicate spices used in that flavouring would be much more appropriate, and I'd been dying for an excuse to use Fenugreek in something!
I'm amazed at how well the sauce turned out, and how nice it smelt cooking. It looked so proper, the sauce, when I make it, exactly like what I'd get in a jar. All of this got mixed together and cooked in the oven for just under two hours.
During the cooking, mum also tasted it and made suggestions, which helped remind me of other things to add. I never add salt when I cook, and some salt did wonders for the taste. She also suggested adding lemon juice, which was fairly inspired and did great things for the taste. I was a bit disappointed, though, that the spiciness of the casserole was dimmed the longer it spent in the oven. All the flavours became muted and subtle, and it didn't smell as good as it had during the start of the cooking. I wonder if that's just a general feature of casseroling?
When the curry was finished, it was a bit disappointing: it was over-spiced. Changing my mind half-way through meant that the two tea-spoons of garam masala I put in near the beginning were most definitely not needed, and the two sets of tastes (lamb curry vs balti) clashed. But it was also exciting. I have enough mastery of Indian spices to know enough about what I did wrong. I can now taste each flavour in a curry and identify where it came from, so I'll know next time what to change, and I'm fairly sure attempt no 2 will be much better. Also, to be fair, the flavour was no worse than a bad curry sauce bought from a shop, and I managed to achieve bad curry sauce status on my own. As mum kept reminding me, that's still something! :D |
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| Finishing the Islington Council Placement |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|06:12 pm] |
Last week I bit the bullet and had a proper chat with my boss at the Islington Council placement. Amongst the stuff talked about were the work and gender issues.
In terms of the work stuff, it was decided that my placement is finished. The database stuff isn't going to work no matter what I do. I keep running up against problems in Access and in Jet. I tried one valiant last workaround using a self-join on the tagging system, which worked for two of the three tags. When I tried it for all three, I got a polite error message saying "we know what you're trying to do, and it should work, but no, not with this DB system", which is at least better than "error, you screwed up, idiot". My end conclusion is that you should never, never, never, never do many to many relationships under Access, except under strict circumstances (mainly when the join table itself is relevant). They are PAIN.
With that decided, I told her I'd rather work on the proper website, telling her my reasons, and she passed me on to Islington Volunteer Action Council (IVAC) who sounded pleased to have me. Unfortunately, none of my boss's emails about this are reaching me, which is annoying and also very strange. I'm worried there's some kind of hidden junk-filtering happening, but that's never been an issue before. If this carries on, I need to go in and write down the email for the IVAC contact manually. Yey technology.
In terms of gender stuff, it was a good talk. My boss understands why I was having issues with a lot of the work, and why I wasn't quite so quick to tell her about the Access problems as she'd envisaged. She told me that, under the equalities work they did, a survey turned up that transgendered people felt they had it the worst in Islington out of all groups who come under the equalities blanket. It's not a result that surprised me at all, having tried looking for support myself. She said they might ask me about it later, and I agreed, later, if ever.
One of the most interesting things for me was that she talked about how the office was a good place to work in terms of tolerance, and how people did try. It made me realise that I agreed with her, and that part of my sudden motivation to talk about things (which resulted in the angry post) was the realisation that, the office I'm in is as good as it gets, and as good as it gets is still not good enough for me. These are people who try, as much as they can, to treat people fairly, and even so it isn't enough. It means that if I want things to be better, I have to do something about it myself. Unfortunately, I'm still not clear what I should be doing, just that it has to be something and it has to come from me.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't want to consistently have to throw my gender issues in everyone's faces. I don't really want to keep thinking about them, as too much obsessing is bad and holds me back from my life. And I do listen when people tell me contradictory things (i.e. this issue is not gender it is something else). Being of a scientific bent, I'll try things out if they seem reasonable and it helps me learn about myself and how I feel. The downside is that I'm experimenting with my own sanity. In order to prove someone wrong, I often need to be miserable for a couple of months, heading finally into suicidal depression before I can definitively say "this is not working". It's strange, but not many demand the same burden of proof from themselves as they ask from me or I from myself, and when I work out someone is wrong, there is always a backlash against the people and the suggestion that caused my misery as well as against myself.
Doing the council placement was, as much as anything, a chance to get away from my gender issues and do something (anything) else. People genuinely believe that there is no such thing as gender and in the modern world it doesn't matter. If that was true, then there really are few places less interested in equality than Islington Council, and few places inside the council less interested in equality than the policies and equalities team in the Chief Executive's Office. If it couldn't work for me here, it couldn't work for me anywhere, and the assertion, that there is no such thing as gender is false.
I know that many people will just ignore the gender part and assume that my sense of isolation and failure was due to something else. Especially with regards to work stuff, ![[info]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) hexter will support me massively if I claim it's obsessiveness on my part but is staggeringly silent whenever gender is mentioned. Then there was that person at John's funeral who did the same, and my mother still occasionally does that, (although losing my temper at her has generally trained her out of that and improved my life at home dramatically, which isn't the best argument for me to behave in a sweet and pleasing manner and not rock the boat), and those aren't the only people. I can feel the social pressure to behave as an obsessive techie. People seem to be so much happier when I behave that way, and so disappointed and upset when I refuse to let them support me in that way. |
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| xkcd one off redesign |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|03:49 pm] |
I followed a link to xkcd today, as someone used an xkcd comic to illustrate a point, and was stunned to find that xkcd had redesigned itself with blink tags, twinkly star backgrounds and scrolling text. It looked awful but strangely familiar! Then the scrolling text proclaimed that the site had been redesigned in honour of Geocities closing down. With that in mind, I realised where I had seen that kind of design before. On Geocities! Very worth a look before the site goes back to normal. |
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| aphenine rambles about religion and the Anglican split from the Catholic Church |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|12:47 am] |
When we went to John's funeral, a little before we stopped to visit my grandmother's grave. While my family fussed over the temporary grave marker and attempted to put some flowers down, I went for a walk among the other graves in the area. As I was walking through the gravestones I idly looked at the names on the dates of the people buried there, wondering about who they were and what they had done before they had died and been buried there. Looking at the names, I noticed that the majority of them were Italian. The next most popular seemed to be English names, among them the barons Tredegar. Looking at all the names reminded me, as suddenly happens, that Catholicism isn't the largest native religion, Anglicanism is, and indeed Catholics are in many ways guests in this country.
It is a fact that most of the time I tend to forget. Roman Catholics aren't really persecuted any more, the only remaining vestige of persecution being some laws about the monarch and who they may marry. The whole issue is so gone and buried in the past that there really isn't any remembrance that being a Catholic in the United Kingdom brought problems and persecutions. Nowadays people are too worried about all the other religions that exist. As I said before, most of the time I don't think of it either, and is not something the often reminded of.
As a short aside, strangely the place I felt most persecuted relating to religion (even though I'm technically an atheist now) was in the place I consider to have been the most tolerant that I have ever been in: when at university in Oxford. I remember all the evangelical Christians, with their events and their insultingly simple interpretations of the Bible and their bottomless coffers and their condescending holiness to the sinners (any one not an evangelical Christian) and the maps with their arrows and numbers, reminding me most of battlefield descriptions of troop movements in wars, with statistics of converts in place of troop losses.
Seeing all those gravestones made me interested in the history of Catholicism in England. So I looked up the Wikipedia entry and was surprised and noticed that it was only in the 1830s that most of the restrictions on Catholics were removed.
Reading through the summary of the history of the start of the Anglican Church made me remember all that I had learnt about Catholicism at that time. I had always thought that it was a bit nasty of Henry VIII to break the church like he did just to get a divorce and some children. However, I am a bit older and wiser now, and I know a little more, and I realised that really, that reason was just the tip of the iceberg, something that provided the catalyst for the King to support a certain group of people in his own country who were fully behind a Protestant reformation of the church.
Remembering the political nature of the papacy, with its horrid little struggles for the temporal power that the papacy gave the holder, I have to admit that I really found it hard to feel anything about the secession. With the Pope being a political appointment, and the appointment being used to pursue the invasion of the English people, I really couldn't see how the interests of the country were served by maintaining the link, and I found it hard to understand why a religious leader would voluntarily support a situation with the mass murder of a segment of his flock (war). By doing so, it struck me the Pope had given up all pretense at pretending to be a spiritual leader of the English people, and they were well to get rid of him. It's a shame, though, that they replaced him with the monarch, and effectively sealed into their system the same problem they sought to get rid of by ditching the Pope, and I wonder how big a problem that helped create with Charles I and his divine right folly.
For the time immediately following the break from the Catholic Church, I can also understand why Catholics were persecuted, a link between nationalism and Anglicanism being firmly established and, in my view, fairly realistic assessment of the situation.
It was nice to see, eventually, the two sides mending their differences and the Catholic Church taking itself in order and transforming itself back into a spiritual organisation. This eventually resulted in the repeal of laws against Catholics. In modern times, it's this focus on spiritual issues that endeared the papacy to me when John Paul II was in charge. Even when I hated some things he was coming out with, at the very least it was possible to see that he was a committed spiritual leader and he actually cared for his flock.
The Wikipedia article ended up talking quite a bit about modern times, especially the events in the last few years. The article gloated quite a bit over the ordination of women priests in the Anglican Church and of the resurgence of the Catholic Church as many left the Anglican church in protest. This turned out to be very prophetic when the next day the deal by the Catholic Church to the Anglican clergy who disliked women bishops was made public on the news. Once more, the two sides are firmly engaged in a grubby politicking with the Catholics gloating over the misfortune of the Anglicans and circling the disaffected Anglican clergy like vultures around a dying corpse. Any respect I had for the papacy as a spiritual entity is evaporating fast and I worry for the future if this kind of bickering continues. |
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| John's Funeral |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|08:28 pm] |
Maybe it sounds flippant, but there's nothing like a funeral to cheer me up. I like funerals. People come together, they cry, the coffin gets lowered into the ground (or in this case cremated) and it's over. You begin, for the first time, to know that that person will never come back, will never be with you again. You learn to start rebuilding your life without that person there any more and you learn to get on with it. Until the funeral, everything is on hold. Life stops, emotions wait in numbness and everything waits for the moment where you can let it go, where you can feel sad and not have anyone hold it against you, where you come to terms with it.
This funeral was rather different from my grandmother's. My grandmother had a church service where the coffin was then ferried to the cemetery and interned. If that was my first proper burial, then this was my first cremation, and the feel was completely different.
We arrived at the Islington Crematorium and entered, the first to arrive. Dad had gotten the music for the service together and went to set things up, plus organise the organist and also place the sheets with the hymn words on the seats. Then everyone else started arriving, most people milling around in front of the crematorium. Eventually we entered and dad put on Moonlight Sonata, which worked well as an entry piece for the coffin and was also the last piece John had been practising.
There was a priest from the Polish Catholic Mission, the same priest who would have presided over my grandmother's funeral had not the "more important priest" shoved him away to do it himself. It was good, because he gave a short service, which stitched things together. Otherwise it would have been depressing.
We sang a hymn. Ania read out a poem which she'd written about remembering her dad which worked really well. We sang another hymn. Then dad got up and delivered a really good speech about John which recalled his life as dad remembered it, which was good because it started from when both my parents and Ania's got married, so there was a hell of a lot to it. It was uplifting and dad used turns of phrases that had us smiling. It was a real antidote to the doom and gloom of the ceremony, and filled in the details of John as a person.
The ceremony wound down with a last hymn and then the curtain came down. One of John's favourite pieces of music was played, which I can't really remember the name of, but it starts with "Show me the prisoner.." and has as part of the refrain "...there but for fortune, go you and I". Very fitting. It was then followed by Streets of London, whose lyrics were also deeply appropriate and I'll probably never be able to listen to that song again without bursting into tears and thinking of the funeral.
The curtain was a bit of an anticlimax. Nothing much happened - no whoosh of flame or satisfying chunk on the bottom of a trench for internment. I felt cheated, like I could still believe that John had just nipped out somewhere and would be coming back soon. I felt cheated of knowing he was forever gone like my grandmother had. My mother said it's less brutal that way, and I really don't know.
After that, we walked out, milled, talked, hugged, that kind of thing. We then got into cars and headed off to a nearby restaurant (Genzo's, Greek, Finchley, very good). We had a whole wing of the restaurant to ourselves and a buffet lunch. Just like after my grandmother's everyone was very hungry and ate like crazy. I didn't think I could, but I polished off a lot. The food was very good. Then we just sat and talked, while everyone else except me and my dad drank wine and got steadily drunk. It was a good party, the kind John would have really liked. I'd never quite been sold on the Irish tradition of a wake, but really, it works, and ours kinda ended up like that. |
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| John Krahn dies |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|01:18 am] |
For those who expressed sympathies in the last post on this topic, I thought it'd be fitting to tell you that he died approximately 24 hours ago, in Enfield Chase hospital surrounded by family. |
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| Islington Council Placement: Since Last Time |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|11:45 pm] |
I knuckled under and got the summary finished during this week. I can't remember when exactly, but early in the week. Apparently, it's a fine report which needs plainer English (it's not only a summary for executive members of the council, but also a summary to feed back the findings to the people who participated in the summary). Phrases like corporate architecture need to be exorcised *grin* I'm quite surprised. I thought there'd be a hell of a lot more wrong with it.
All the time since has moved on to the Community Database, an internal database for all the community and charitable organisations within Islington.
This has been both a bit of a fun thing to do and the bane of my life. Both reasons broadly tie into the fact that I'm doing it in Microsoft Access.
When I heard that I had to use Access to do the database, I was not impressed. pplfichi had filled my head with stories about how bad it was and I had visions about how I'd fail horribly because all my database skills, which lay in using SQL, would be stripped away leaving me woefully unprepared to do the task. Added to a lack of ability to write simple scripts for retrieving, displaying and saving data meant that I'd be horrendously powerless.
That didn't happen, or rather not initially. I was rather impressed with Access to tell the truth. It's fairly intuitive to use, it contains useful automation for common tasks and I can see why it is an industry standard. Additionally, it contains full SQL support, and a near seamless ability to transfer between SQL queries and ones created using Access's fluffy interface. I quickly learnt how to rewrite many to many database relationship as a single SQL query (in PHP the framework would do that for me) and overall, I learnt a lot about SQL and databases. I even learnt to perform some simple scripting tasks in Visual Basic using the code editor which, although not a joy to use, was quite fun and offered a surprising level of achievement for effort.
The bane followed afterwards as, buoyed by my success, I started pushing Visual Basic and Access to do more of what I needed and discovered that Visual Basic is, well, pretty damn evil. It has no internal logic, so you can't figure out what to do, all the code you get is from snipets on the web, not all of which works. The interfaces to the database are really strange, completely unlike the standard C and php interfaces I've used to MySQL (and which I know are also similar for other SQL servers) and lacking certain features that I've taken for granted and which I thought were basic (you can't get the number of records returned by a query and you can't find out the id of the last insert command).
Before I abandoned database work in favour of the summary, I'd finished the test version of the new database and just needed to transfer the working code to the final version. So this week that's what I did.
When I had finished doing that, I started entering the data from the old database into the newer one. After one day of solid data entry, I had debugged the input form thoroughly, but I had barely done one page and I had severe RSI, so I had to find an automated way of transfering the data over. So on Friday, I investigated a way of getting PHP to see the database. This was an exercise in pain that eventually led to success and also opened another possibility: I could combine the Access database with CakePHP and create a mock-up for the internet. This would have one awesome advantage: IVAC were being paid to produce such a project for the public sphere, but were stalling, and I have been told that maybe I could be paid instead to do the work. This is clearly awesome. Plus I would feel a sense of satisfaction, because when I first came to Islington, I looked up voluntary organisations I could help and found the system severely screwed, and this annoyed me.
This coming week, I need to write the PHP script that will transfer the old database to the new database, and check and verify the data plus provide user instructions, and I am done with Islington Council. After that, well, if I want to, I can make a web based version. |
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| Hospitals are no place for the well... or the sick either |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|11:14 pm] |
When I was young, I played a lot with a friend. Her name was Ania.
We knew each other because my mother and her mother, Bozenia, were good friends, I think in Poland, and now both live here in London. Bozenia lives in Enfield and married an Englishman named John.
Whenever mum would get together with Bozenia, dad and John would get together and chat while Ania and I played. As I got older, I chatted more with John. I liked chatting to him as he was interesting. He worked as a microbiological technician at the Institute for Tropical Medicine which was part of the University of London. He broadly ran some of the lab courses for the students and kept the professors from killing themselves: the kind of person that a place like that needs to function or else it grinds to a halt. He always had stories to tell of professors doing something strange or dangerous, about the latest attempt to have him fired either due to efficiency because he didn't appear to do anything or because he didn't have a PhD (something he rectified later) and the department tried to maintain "standards", plus various facts about how likely you are to really get infected from not washing your hands or other things, and other interesting snipets of biology. Since then, he retired and stayed at home, cooking and doing an occasional bit of work, like heading off with the British Army in Kosovo to check their water supply.
Recently, we developed a cough which would not go away. Eventually, Bozenia took him for a scan which revealed a mass in the lungs which turned out to be cancer. Further checks in the hospital revealed that it had metastasised and that he had tumours in his brain and under his voice box, plus blood clots in the lungs. A two week stay in hospital helped a lot and he went home.
This weekend, he got suddenly worse. We went to see him (again) in hospital. He was really bad. He barely made sense, no one knows what's wrong. He's really weak and there's no weight on him at all. Comparing the person he was to the person he is now is terrifying.
There's little we can do for John, so we tried to look after the living and those supporting John. My parents helped support Bozenia and I not-so-subtly grabbed Ania for a walk and did the same. It's nice when people understand what you're doing and work with you so you don't have to explain.
The worst thing that eats all of us up is not knowing whether he's terminal or not. Whether it's best to make him comfortable and get ready for the end, making the best use of the time available, or to sod that and fight it all the way. *shrug* |
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| Cats and Window Ledges |
[Oct. 4th, 2009|10:53 pm] |
Before we spent a lot of money to install a cat flap into the transparent garden door, we taught the cats to leave through various windows in the house. The two windows they could leave by were both on the first floor. The first was on the hall landing, directly above the bathroom extension's roof. The second was my window, which has a ledge that leads onto the bathroom extension's roof. The cats would run along the garden wall, up on top of the bathroom and into the house. As winter was cold, we'd shut the windows (or at summer on cold nights), so the cats learnt to meaow to gain entry. If I was sitting at my computer, I'd have the window open and cats passing through my room day and night.
Once we installed the cat flap, we hoped this behaviour would cease. It's annoying to be woken at 5am by a cat demanding to come in after a night's jaunt, and my bed is right by my window. They could now come into and out of the house without bothering anyone and they could do it whenever they liked, without involvement from us. The cat flap was a win-win situation.
The cats, however, have other ideas, and still like to come through my room. I think it's easier for them if they leave the garden, as they have to go up and onto the walls anyway. It's also got a better view of the surroundings, so they feel happier venturing out, with less of the "waiting a bit in case the other cat gets eaten" behaviour that they do.
Unfortunately, my window sticks a bit, so it needs a good strong push to open and shut. This, combined with being half asleep yesterday, meant that poor Pebbles got the window opened on her, sweeping her off the window ledge and into a one storey plunge to the ground. Poor girl... Thankfully it didn't harm her at all. |
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| Economics and What It Means To Me |
[Sep. 22nd, 2009|10:43 pm] |
For ages I've been wanting to do a more serious post about economics and why I started to get interested in it and why I spent time thinking about it and what it came to mean to me. I want to do that because the subject became important to me, but I also realise that what it means to me is not what it means to many other people. ( Read more... ) |
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| New Mobile Phone |
[Sep. 22nd, 2009|08:14 pm] |
For a person who's supposed to be a geek, I haven't been very technologically savvy with my mobile phone. I bought one several years ago that managed to be a Motorola but without the Motorola software. It was therefore very good. It was a simple touchscreen phone and I adored it because it worked fantastically as a phone, it was small and light, it had good battery life and because I could type out properly punctuated text messages on a mini-Qwerty keyboard. My only regret about it was that it couldn't do internet/email (although, I always thought it could, just that 3 wouldn't let anyone use data other than their content back then). It was the Motorola A1000.
Having bought a phone that was fantastic and better in every way than my last, I didn't feel a burning need to upgrade any time soon. At the time, no phone appeared that was like it, and when it stopped being sold (and even Motorola seems not to want to admit they made it), there wasn't anything like it out there that wasn't stupidly expensive or intended for business use.
Time passed by and I had to trade my phone in. It was tending to turn itself off randomly and my father (who had the same model bought at the same time) had his phone die on him over a year ago. Sooner or later my phone would be dead :( Plus my contract was by now ancient and over-priced for what I was getting. I'd come back from Birmingham and had no income. I wanted to see if I could get a touchscreen with a qwerty keypad for less than I was paying. Unfortunately, for the last few months, touchscreen phones with Qwerty were iPhone or equivalent, and these were expensive and only available for an amount equivalent to my old tariff.
However, technology moves on, so for £10 a month less, I now have a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, which has so far been totally awesome having all of the good features of my last phone, but also internet, email, alarms, a proximity sensor (so that I don't inadvertently press buttons when talking to people), the ability to take music with me, a camera that isn't bloody awful and a whole host of other things I probably don't know about yet and haven't figured out. I know it's an old phone, and it's been around long enough for it to be old hat, but I like having it. |
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| Driving |
[Sep. 20th, 2009|04:43 pm] |
Thank you to everyone who congratulated me on passing my test. Much appreciated! I promise, hairyears to be careful *grin*
Since passing my test, I have been out twice, with my mum, without L plates. Scary. It feels very different driving out there, no longer a learner. I feel the loss of learner status strongly, especially as I can see that I have a long way to go before I'm a confident and safe driver, so I'm going to get some just passed P plates! I had heard from some people that P plates are a bad idea, and from others that they are a good idea, but I dislike not being able to communicate that I'm a newbie driver, and arseholes always exist.
On my first trip out, I convinced my mother to climb in the car with me and we drove around to the back of Hampstead Heath, to an area where we usually can't get to when walking due to distance, and where there is a car park. It was a really sunny Saturday morning, so the area was busy as hell and the car park was full. However, we found a parking space, which was really tight and so I swapped out letting my mother try to park. On her fifth attempt, she got in. There was a bored SUV driver behind us who'd just switched off the engine and was waiting with extremely patient resignation. When he drove past us, his wife clapped. It was hilarious. |
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| Cooking Exploits |
[Sep. 20th, 2009|04:28 pm] |
The last two days involved some interesting cooking exploits, both involving fish.
After shopping on Friday, me and my mother made a ceviche, which is a Peruvian dish. We used raw sea bass and we put it in lemon juice and salt for two minutes minimum, letting the lemon juice cook the fish. It tasted really good, and both of us felt very brave for trying it. So far we are not puking our guts out, which is very good :D The idea came from Jamie Oliver's travels round the USA show and River Cottage Gone Fishing. If two shows tell you to do something, you just have to do it, right? ;D
Yesterday I made another Japanese inspired fish dish, also from River Cottage Gone Fishing (the same episode, coincidentally), which was really scary to make. It involved poaching salmon in a sauce made from soy, rice wine vinegar and apple juice. One reason that it was scary to make is that I didn't know the relative quantities to make the sauce, although the guy on the TV program's attitude seemed to be just slop it in, it'll be fine, so I wasn't worried about it too much until I'd poured things in and tasted it and it tasted awful. I hoped that somehow the cooking process would make the sauce taste better, but I was really panicking when it seemed not to be improving. However, when we sat down to eat at the end, the sauce tasted quite good and the salmon was all right, but overcooked, and I know roughly that the quantities I used were good but that I should cook the sauce a lot more before I poach the salmon. Dad explained to me that soy is made through a fermentation process, so it needs a bit of cooking to make it edible.
Today we're going to have the first roast dinner in a while. We stopped making Sunday roasts after we ate them all winter long and got sick of them. I'm really looking forwards to today's! |
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| Imperion |
[Aug. 31st, 2009|01:54 am] |
Over the last month, I signed up to an online web game called Space Project, which was a beta. The idea was that you started off with a planet in a solar system which you expanded, building ships and settling other planets. The game is a mass multiplayer game, so you also get raided (and get to raid) other players.
A while ago, they reset Space Project into the proper version, which they called Imperion. Thanks to a bug in the game, I started playing a little later than the other players around me, and this turned out to be a problem because they were more advanced than I was and this meant I had to struggle quite hard to do well.
One of my neighbours started raiding me, and with a bit of patience I managed to push him away. But then I got attacked by the number one ranked player, at which point I gave up. Actually, I didn't give up, but I took a leaf from the Greek city states about which I'm reading and went and joined a league.
The league I chose to join was called Galactic Imperium, which despite the grand name has a peaceful constitution. By joining the league, the head of the league performed diplomacy on my behalf and the number one ranked player left me alone, at which point I could start to grow. In gratitude for this act, I decided that I would take a position as the second-in-command of my group. The league is subdivided into various groups of which there are six. My group is group 3.
I was really apprehensive about taking such a position. The last time I tried any position of leadership was when I tried to run a mod called Unreal Command. The leader of that project had to leave due to time constraints, so I took over. That was at the time that my mental problems were beginning, so I did really badly. Eventually I left Unreal Command without telling anyone as the whole project imploded under the weight of its expectations. I also wasn't a good person for taking orders and could get quite annoyed when people under me didn't do exactly what I wanted when I wanted it, which isn't a good leadership trait.
So far, however, I seem to have been doing okay, and this has been massively confidence boosting. On the whole, for some strange reason, some people are doing what I tell them to do. This is despite the fact that I'm not trying to be very authoritarian. In fact, I tried learning from past mistakes and, instead of fighting that my members are individuals who make their own decisions, I'm trying to build the group around that fact.
Helping to run the group is an awful lot of fun, but it is also really tiring because the members of my group (including myself) are not used to acting as a group. We have no structures, no past actions upon which to base future ones, no method of deciding how to make decisions. All group stuff has to come from me, we haven't got to a self-sustaining level of being. Also, in terms of the game, we are in a really hot location. There are no less than three players currently raiding my group members and the game hasn't kindly let ourselves get slowly organised, but thrown us into the deep end. At least it's not boring.
After a solid week of doing it, the strain of running things is getting to me, so I'm going to get a break from it tomorrow. When I come back, there will be more problems, as usual :D |
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| Islington Council Placement Update |
[Aug. 31st, 2009|01:22 am] |
My Islington Council work placement, after starting so well, started to fall apart. My original manager left to go on leave, the next one left the next day because her father was ill in Australia, the one after that went on leave a couple of days later and I was left with someone who didn't know much about what I was doing. I hate being abandoned when at work, probably because my supervisor Birmingham did it an awful lot.
It was bad that I had no one really to talk to about the work, because it turned out that the report I was summarising was impossible to summarise, and that it took me a while to realise this. The report turned out to have a logical contradiction, and for a slightly obsessive person like me, that can be fatal.
As the database stuff, that was going really well and I was even doing some basic scripting to do some advanced tasks in Access. However anything I've tried since then doesn't really work or requires more advance scripting knowledge than I have. The basic database I have now is all right, but I'm thinking that if they want anything more complicated, they really should get me to write it as a webpage, because the level of complexity I need to introduce into Access would make it impossible for them to update it manually. Since that is the whole point of me using Access, the work I'm doing on this is also logically contradicting itself. |
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| Islington Council Placement |
[Aug. 18th, 2009|09:58 pm] |
I'm now into my second week of my placement at Islington Council.
Overall the placement is quite a lot of fun and I'm glad I'm doing it. It's getting me out of the house, I get to be in productive environment with other people and am doing something useful.
The work they getting me to do involves two different strands. One strand is trying to write a Executive Summary of a report on the experiences of disabled children as they go through Islington Councils system. The other strand involves redesigning, implementing and then filling a database they use internally which contains all the community organisations inside Islington.
I really love having two different strands to pursue. I can work on whichever one I feel like working on at the moment and they are both so utterly different that they are a relief to do when I've done too much of the other.
The Executive Summary of the report is really interesting because it tests my summarising skills along with my ability to organise information once I have read it into a way that will be easily understandable to other people. Its communication and it's also an emotional aspect of the kind of work that the council does.
The database is fairly standard, and nothing that I haven't done in terms of design before. The real kick is that I'm implementing it all in Microsoft Access, which I have never done before, and which I was really scared about using, having heard some horror stories. It turns out that some of the horror stories were true and some are very much exaggerated, and I could not imagine some of the things I have managed to achieve in just a few days of working with Microsoft Access.
Other things I like about the placement is that the office staff are really nice and very supportive, plus the managers I've had are really nice and take an interest in me, which is a shock after my PhD supervisor, but really really welcome.
I only have two real gripes about the placement. One is that I don't feel comfortable wearing office clothes, as I haven't managed yet to find a look that doesn't make me feel gendered in some way. The second is that my RSI flared up very badly the week before the placement started, and pretty much anything I do is painful. Because I'm on placement, I can't quite take the time out to recover that I normally would. This is a serious dampener on what would otherwise be fun, but I'm trying to bear up under it. |
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synergetic's journal