Irony and rehearsals

Countering the idea of patriotism = supporting the war (in America) this article from last week's The Onion is just excellent:

It's one thing to question our leaders in the days leading up to a war. But it is another thing entirely to do it during a war. Once the blood of young men starts to spill, it is our duty as citizens not to challenge those responsible for spilling that blood.

[ . . . ]

At this difficult time, President Bush needs my support. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld needs my support. General Tommy Franks needs my support. It is not my function as a citizen in a participatory democracy to question our leaders. And to exercise my constitutional right - nay, duty - to do so would be un-American.

And they say Americans can't do irony... everyone should read The Onion. As a sidenote, a recent poll of citizens in St Louis, SF, found that 22% of the respondents feel they have no right to question the war now. 56% said it's okay to question the war, but only 23% believes it's okay to protest the war; a bunch of statistics which I find shocking. I am astonished at the ease with which some "patriotic Americans" have apparently forgotten about the rather fundamental right to free speech.

As of yesterday afternoon, I am now officially On School Holidays. As such, and since we're in our last year of school (a very strange thought) our year did a Leavers' Assembly yesterday, which was similar to a pantomime[1] and included a song at the end, which was a filk of We Will Rock You ("We will, we will miss you"). This required the rewritten lyrics to be projected via a laptop onto a large screen as a Powerpoint slide so that the rest of the school could sing along; and being known as someone who knows her way around a computer, I was volunteered to take care of this.

We finished off our rehearsal with a run-through of the song, and then someone yelled, "Okay, can we have the music for the next song now?"

Next song? Excuse me?

So I asked her (the organiser) whether she also wanted the rewritten words for the second song (The Time of our Lives, from Dirty Dancing... *shudder* *Eighties shudder*) on the screen in Powerpoint. She seemed to think I'd done it already, and didn't realise that I'd never been given lyrics for the second song. All this while lyrics sheets were being handed round, so I told her I could do it now, quickly - I leapt down to the laptop clutching a lyrics sheet (the time being 11:12, three minutes before the real thing was due to start) clicked New, dragged a text box and started typing. Frantically. But there was nowhere to put the sheet of paper, so I had to stand it up against the screen and could therefore only see half of what I was typing... I had to go by instinct as to whether I'd made any typing errors in the first few words of each line. I was almost halfway down the page when people started filing into the hall for assembly and Julia told me to leave it since I wouldn't be able to finish it, although she let me carry on when I showed her how much I'd typed already.

And when I finished typing it all (on the ultra-flat laptop keyboard, which considerably slowed my typing speed), I saw there was no way it was going to fit on one page as it was (except maybe with 6pt font) so I had to run huge numbers of lines together, squash stanzas together, etc. while frantically trying to finish before the whole school had come in. I didn't even have time to proofread it for tyops, of which I still don't know whether there were any in the end.

And the end-of-termitis has caught up with me - I nearly fell asleep at 4pm yesterday, and today I have difficulty in talking because of a rather sore throat.

Incoherence and audiobooks

A short word of warning first: I'm not feeling very well, and I seem to have mislaid much of my clarity of thought. If the following seems at all incoherent or rambling, I'm blaming it on being ill. It's a nice get-out clause :)

Yesterday's sore throat has turned into a very sore throat coupled with a good bout of exhaustion. I'm typing this on my five year old laptop, which I think is rather grateful to get some attention for once.

I'm in bed listening to an abridged audiobook of Jingo by Terry Pratchett, and I've found that it's very possible to listen and type at the same time, not least because I've read the book so many times that I can easily keep up with what's going on. I haven't ever really listened to the abridged Discworld audio books before - I do have quite a few of the 10-hour, unabridged ones, though. I happened to win the first 26 abridged audiobooks in a competition about 18 months ago, and I thought I may as well listen to one of them. It turns out that since I know the book so well my mind keeps filling in some of the paragraphs or jokes that have been left out, so I keep laughing in places where absolutely nothing funny has been said!

Actually, keeping on the same line of thought, I haven't actually spent that much money on my audiobook collection. There's the abridged ones that I won, then there were two unabridged ones that I won (one of them signed), three unabridged ones that I bought on CD as MP3 files (which cost about a third of the normal price), one unabridged that I found in WHSmiths for 50p (down from £20), another unabridged one that was given away in MP3 format by...some computer magazine with a DVD on the cover, and I think I actually bought the remaining two of my collection. I'm such a cheapskate :)

Bleh; illness

Didn't eat much today, not least because I only woke up just before 1pm. The best word to describe how I felt today is undoubtedly "Bleh". I then went almost immediately to the computer, read all of my blogroll in half an hour, then steeled myself to begin catching up with alt.fan.pratchett (not having read it since the 24th of March, except a few conversations on Google).

I read about 1000 of the 2640 messages that were unread, skipping some of the threads that I'd read on Google or that were uninteresting to me or that were too intellectual for me in my blehness to focus on. Someone posted (either yesterday or the day before) that Terry Pratchett was going to be on BBC2's The Big Read last night, talking about his favourite book (probably Roy Lewis' The Evolution Man, which I also must read). Hmph. I sat through 80 minutes of that dross (although I probably would have minded it more if I'd been awake enough to notice) and he didn't appear. Hmph. No one nominated any of his books, either. The good thing about that program, though, is that they played about 10-15 seconds of The Godfather theme (should that be "of the The Godfather theme"?) The annoying thing now is that I can't remember it, my mind is just coming up with the LOTR soundtrack. Duuh duuuuh... duh da da da di dahhh... Before that it was She Is Dead from the soundtrack of Leon. Which was slightly better, because I can remember more than eight notes from She Is Dead.

I also ordered Family Bites today (yay!) along with the new Discworld Companion, because Amazon were doing a Perfect Partner thing with the two books. More books to read...

Partly due to spending about four/five hours on the internet/Usenet straight from when I got up, I've been in a bit of a daze today. Non-thinking. However, I couldn't have been that non-thinking, because I managed to watch (and follow) an hour and a half of The West Wing, which I'd been avoiding all week because I thought I was too tired to watch it.

I seem to have unintentionally booked up most of next week: Tuesday is when I'm having my hair cut and coloured (I finally phoned up for an appointment -somehow I got a 10am appointment. Gah. I can but hope that they'll take less than four hours, unlike the last lot I went to); Wednesday is when I'm having my job interview in Farnborough; the time's been changed from 5pm to 3pm, which is a Good Step. This means that Tuesday is also when I'm doing lots of research and preparation for my interview. Thursday is when I'm going to a friend's house to watch Ep II: Attack Of The Clones, which is why I had to sit through The Phantom Menace yesterday. Still, at least it's over now, and I won't have to watch it again :) And Friday I'm going round to visit another friend, to "do something".

All of the above depending on me not being really ill. If it's just how I am at the moment (fuzzy head, bleh, blurry eyes, tired, blocked nose, soreish throat, coughing a bit, sneezing) I should be alright.

And now, I'm really really tired, despite the earliness of the hour, so I'm going to bed. But first I must point you towards the Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld, which... actually, I'm not going to explain it. Just rest assured that it's pure brilliance.

Video game war (and other stories)

How have I never come across this before?

I present to you the dullest blog in the world:

Thinking about making some food   April 8
I was doing some things and noticed that it was nearly time for something to eat. I may well go to the kitchen and make some food shortly. This will probably happen five or ten minutes, although it could be as long as fifteen.

The blog can be seen as a subtle satire, nay parody, of the self-centeredness of the classic just-moved-from-LiveJournal type weblogger, whose every action is blithely noted down and stored away, archived for posterity. A mocking tribute, no less, to the leagues of journal-bloggers who are slowly filling up the ether with the minute details of what they had for breakfast, and how long they were stuck in the traffic this morning.

Or it can just be seen as funny. You choose. (And anyone who imagines any sincerity in the above paragraph is hugely mistaken, I might add. Particularly in light of the nature of my last three blog entries.)

Today I've read a number of articles that offer an interesting slant on the war in Iraq. One in particular stood out - James Lilecks on the "video game war".

Every day I watch the news, hours and hours of news, and I?ve yet to see one dead Iraqi soldier.

Now it?s a video game war.

[ . . . ]

Show the carnage. Rope it off, show it in the late-night hours when the kids are in bed, but show it. [ . . . ] Don?t presume we can?t take it or must be shielded, like children, from the truth of the thing we have unleashed. I?m not suggesting that the news should be nothing but Death on Parade, or linger with unwholesome glee on the injuries done to our soldiers or theirs. But you cannot edit death out of war; to do so defames those experience it. How can we understand the soldiers who return home without understanding not just what they saw, but what they did?

I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. The way that some media have been reporting this made-for-TV war has had the most incredible Wag The Dog-ish overtones. Although, admittedly, the British media seem to be rather less biased than the US equivalents, all the images we see are sanitised versions of events carefully selected to back up the notion that our armies are just walking into their cities, welcomed on all sides by the Iraqis' open arms. (Was that 'semi-automatic arms'?)

There was a particularly good "Oops, we didn't mean that" kind of moment on my radio news this morning, covering the toppling of Saddam's statue - "History is being rewritten at the moment!"

Freudian slip? You never can tell...

On a remarkably different note, who wants one of these?

Design graduate Andrew Cubitt has taken the humble toilet roll and turned it into a hi-tech news and information service. A unit installed in front of a toilet on the cubicle wall provides up-to-the-minute information on products, stocks and shares and lottery results.

People can even print off the information on a standard toilet roll.

Well, it's better than taking the newspaper in there with you...

Insider dealings

A few days ago, the share price of my blog came crashing down, from $0.04 to $0.00 because it was so overvalued that the share price was automatically readjusted. And that's massively overvalued. As in, second most overvalued out of 32,000 blogs (I never did check to see whether it got to #1).

So the share price is currently at $0.00 (or 0.47¢ to be more precise). And with all my shares inexplicably sold out, no one'll be buying any more to push up the share price at all.

Step in Mark Pilgrim (hopefully), who has said he will start doing insider trading deals - in return for free shares, he will prominently link to someone's blog for a week, thus pushing up the valuation, pushing down the P/E of the blog (making it 'undervalued') so that lots of people will buy the shares.

Good so far, except that I have no available shares for people to buy. However, there's something called Leveraged Buy Outs where the owner of a blog can buy back shares that have been bought, at three times the share price. So what I'm going to do is to buy back all my shares (at a price of $0.00) and then give all the former shareholders one-fifth the number of shares they previously had (rounded up where necessary). In monetary terms they've lost nothing because of the zero share price. I sell the remaining shares I have (minus the ones destined for Mark) and they're back on the market. Mark links to me (again, hopefully!), valuation goes up, hopefully share price goes up.

That's the theory, anyway. Posted here just in case you were wondering where all your shares had vanished to!

Update: In buying shares from my 19 shareholders and gifting Mark free shares, I have reached my limit of 20 transactions in a 24 hour period. So apologies, but everyone else will have to wait until tomorrow to get any shares back from me.

The Interview and expensive haircuts

A number of things have happened over the last few days, the biggest of which has been the Interview, which took place on Wednesday.

For those who don't know, I'm currently looking for an IT job for my gap year (next school year), before I go off to university to study Physics with Computer science. So far I've applied to the Year in Industry scheme and IBM's Pre-University Employment scheme. YinI came up with an interview for me at company in Farnborough for a web design post, which sounds ideal to me.

I felt that the interview went fairly well, although I was asked a few tricky questions. In this case 'tricky' means 'vague or ill-defined'. I find it quite difficult to answer a question of the "What would you do in this type of situation?" sort without having more specific parameters for the situation.

I was quite surprised by how much detail the interviewer went into with his questions regarding the software I use. What browser do I use? [I think I gained some unexpected brownie points for saying 'Opera and Mozilla' rather than IE.] Why do I use those browsers rather than IE? And which versions of those browsers? Which HTML editor do I use? [Notepad; more brownie points, I think.] Which other HTML editors have I used or heard of? Which search engine do I use? Why? Which OSs am I familiar with? Which versions of those OSs? [He started laughing when I included Windows 3.1, not unreasonably.]

My answers to all of the above were meticulously noted down. It's good that I was able to come up with reasons why Google is the best search engine - I read quite a number of articles about Google when they bought Blogger a couple of months ago. And I kept mentioning that I had a website, but he never asked for the URL, which was kind of annoying, in that I wanted to show off my (relatively) nice clean (almost valid) HTML and CSS, and almost fully accessible website (according to Dive Into Accessibility).

The interviewer also took the phrase 'can read books in French' to mean 'fluent in French', which almost made me laugh. There's a big difference - as someone who can do the former, but certainly cannot claim to be the latter, I know.

I was told today by YinI that they had narrowed it down to three people (for two different jobs), and I was one of the three. I now have to wait until after Monday to find out the result. Fingers crossed.

In other news, I got my hair cut on Tuesday, and was gobsmacked to learn, at the point of being asked for money, that they charged extra to dry my hair. The default is apparently to leave your hair wet (or at least damp) and then send you out into the street. Of course, they didn't tell me this when they offered to blow-dry my hair, and so I only found out afterwards that it cost extra. Whereupon I pointed out that this had not been mentioned, and so he let me off without paying the extra.

Not only that, you won't believe how much I wasn't charged for drying my hair.

£16.50.

Let me say that again: sixteen pounds and fifty pence.

Maybe I should withdraw my uni application and enroll on a hairdressing course?

The muse and the notebook

I have a reading bug, a fact which may not be a surprise to those who are regular readers of this weblog. However, not content with that, I now appear to have caught the writing bug as well.

The vast majority of what I've been writing is either hugely uninteresting to everyone who is not me, or an undirected heap of wittering ramblings, which is why I haven't posted them here. I've been sitting in front of the computer (my little ole laptop) and just pouring words onto the screen.

For example.

Yesterday I happened to buy a nice notebook. But last night I spent 1000 words writing in praise of my new notebook. [I had to doublecheck this just now, because I didn't believe it. It has to be seen to be believed.] The notebook is really rather nice, but not, I feel, deserving of quite that much attention being lavished upon it. I may post the notebook praise at some point, but at the moment I'm rather of the opinion that it may make me appear in a somewhat maniacal light, which is not really what I want.

I've used quite a lot of electrons musing about why I've started keeping a personal journal, why I bother to write it at all, what I hope to gain from it. A little bit of the "notebook" entry was about this, and about three thousand words last month when my inner muse first sat up and took notice, and a few other bits and pieces here and there. Due to the fact that a lot of these things of mine are written late at night when my mind's really not working too well I never seemed to resolve any of these questions. But a big part of the answer to "Why I write my journal" (which really isn't so much a diary-type journal as a blank page - alright, screen - for my thoughts to cover and fill up. I believe it's traditionally called "taking your pen for a walk") presented itself yesterday. Finally hitting upon an answer was very satisfying, since I've never quite been able to express the idea to myself before, and I was therefore somewhat miffed when I noticed that Laurabelle had reached the same conclusion three days ago:

Now I am keeping a paper journal again, and I write in it things that I can't write here. It is a letter to my future self. This blog as well is a letter, written to my friends but open to the world.

A letter to my future self. That's it. I write not just for the enjoyment of writing, or to have written, but to read at some future point. This also shouldn't have been a surprise to me :)

Vaughan also seems to have hit this particular nail on the head (although I don't know from what angle he was coming at the issue, or even whether it was the same issue) with his rephrasing of the question: "Who is your audience?" Had I read that a month ago, it could have saved my typing fingers a whole lot of work.

Parallel universes

There's a fascinating article in Scientific American this month about parallel universes. Based on the idea that space is infinite and using elementary probability, it is likely that you have a doppelgänger about 10 to the power 10²⁸ metres from here, since "even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere".

There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.

I love this idea. There's someone out there who is exactly like me in every way - even down to the clothes I have on - and who's typing this, but didn't correct the typing error that I just did. And another one who did correct it, but who has the Beatles album Help! instead of Sgt Pepper. And another one who is still set on doing a Maths with Computer Science degree at uni instead of having changed her mind to Physics with Computer Science instead, or who failed her driving test, or who accepted the job offer she received in February, and another one who's done all of the above.

This type of physics is why I chose to apply for a Physics degree - it's so interesting, and I want to find out more about it! And thanks to Schrödinger's Cat (or at least, the physics behind the experiment) I know that it is literally true that when I receive my A-level results in August until I open the envelope and see them I have both passed and failed; got 4 'A' grades and 4 'U' grades and everything in between. Until I see the result, all possible results are true.

I'm still in awe that this stuff is science fact, not fiction. (And I hope I'm not misrepresenting it here.) It was a big enough shock when I found out that light doesn't travel in straight lines.

So should you believe in parallel universes? The principal arguments against them are that they are wasteful and that they are weird. The first argument is that multiverse theories are vulnerable to Occam's razor because they postulate the existence of other worlds that we can never observe. Why should nature be so wasteful and indulge in such opulence as an infinity of different worlds?

Yet this argument can be turned around to argue for a multiverse. What precisely would nature be wasting? Certainly not space, mass or atoms--the uncontroversial Level I multiverse already contains an infinite amount of all three, so who cares if nature wastes some more? The real issue here is the apparent reduction in simplicity. A skeptic worries about all the information necessary to specify all those unseen worlds.

Verticality

I seriously want one of these, even if just for the novelty factor - a vertical keyboard: Apparently being able to touch type helps when you're trying to use the keyboard, but should you forget where some of the keys are, there are two wing mirrors to allow you to see the keys. And while we're on the subject of things I want, Synapse is a media player with a 'central intelligence system' called the Brain.

The Brain is the central intelligence of Synapse. When you use Synapse, it learns. When you play songs, it learns. It learns what you like and it knows exactly how likely -- to the hundredth of a percent -- you are to play those songs. It learns your style from you. There is no master database anywhere telling it to play two rock songs one after other. It knows to do that because you did it. And if you never played two rocks songs together, it wouldn't either, which alone beats any other product available today.

You can also download the Brain as a Winamp plugin. If I get the time (looking increasingly less likely at the moment, seeing as I've just realised that I'll have finished all my A-level exams in two months' time and therefore have some serious revision to do) I'll report on how effective it is.

And my, aren't we mature:

American Secretary of State Colin Powell has said France will suffer consequences for having opposed the US over the war with Iraq. He said the US would be reviewing all aspects of its relations with France in light of its decision to veto any UN Security Council resolution authorising war against Iraq.

Conclusion: America's a democracy; the world is not and instead bows to America.

Today was a good day

Today was a good day.

I went for another interview in Farnborough today, having not yet heard anything about the interview I attended there two weeks ago (for a different job) since the interviewer went on annual leave before telling YinI whether he'd made a decision. Today's interview turned out to be not a formal interview at all, but merely a chance to go through my CV and find out what kind of job I'd be suited for.

It was quite relaxing since I got to chat with the interviewer, and then with the current YinI students for about an hour, and then a short guided tour around the grounds - during which I discovered their building has a gym and a general library, and a 'common room' with newspapers, leather sofas, vending machines and free internet access - and then off home again with a good hour's reading on the way back. I don't know why, but I really do find commuting by train relaxing - all that time when you get to just sit and read, uninterrupted and in a world of your own.

You can tell I don't travel by train that much, can't you?

Anyway, almost immediately I walked in the door, I got a phonecall from YinI offering me the web design job from the two-weeks-ago interview, which I really really wanted. So I now have a job all sorted for next year (and hopefully sponsorship through university, and a job at the end of it, if it all goes well). Yay me.

Actually, the first good thing that happened today (as far as I can remember - I haven't got up that early in three weeks, so a lot of this morning is a blur in my memory) was getting on my train and finding £2.15 on the seat that had presumably fallen out of the pocket of whoever was last sitting there. On the basis of "see a penny, pick it up", etc. (and the fact that the train was pulling out of the station by that time) I have to say I pocketed the lot. It seemed to work; I think I almost got 215 pennies' worth of luck out of it!

Having got the web design job, it means I now get to spend the summer getting to grips with tricker CSS and having a stab at learning ASP, which is what's used on their intranet pages. Should be fun :)

Verse

The haiku meme spreads
I'm not very good at them
But I can still try.

Update: [reposted from 'bel's comments box]

So, we've moved onto limericks now,
Can I write one? At least I know how.
If you can't find a rhyme
An odd word will do fine
Such as alpha, or beta, or tau.

Lies, damned lies and...

There seem to be promising signs that some of the media is starting to turn on Bush and Blair and question some of the less savoury aspects of the war - via Kevin, the Independant article "Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies":

Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end ? a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."

I'm glad that the media is starting to remember about these WMD - ever since the official excuse for the war became one of liberation, they seemed to have been all but forgotten about. Here's that ABC article as well, which reports on some of the reasons behind the war - mainly that 9/11 spurred the US into stating that "it was unacceptable to sit back and let either terrorist groups or dictators developing weapons of mass destruction strike first at us." Because, obviously, it's so much better to pick a country to invade that will use very little force against you, that you can storm across in three weeks and whose WMD won't even be used during the course of said invasion. Yep, that's ridding the world of an awesome and evil threat to global peace, all right.

Another 13 civilian deaths

Another 13 civilian deaths to go on Iraq Body Count:

US soldiers opened fire on Iraqi protesters in a town outside Baghdad after being shot at, an American officer said yesterday.

The director of the local hospital said 13 people were killed and 75 injured.

Approaching at high speed

I seem to have just woken up to the fact that my A-level exams are starting in three weeks. Three weeks yesterday, in fact. A very scary thought, although with just about all of my modules I'm at the stage where I'm fairly comfortable with the topics and completing a past exam paper is no longer a hugely daunting prospect. The closeness of the exams does mean that I'll probably be fairly quiet blogwise over the next eight weeks or so. Either that or I'll be posting more little bits than normal, as distraction from revision :)

A few little thoughts that randomly traversed my mind this afternoon:

I heard someone's cover version of California Dreamin' on the radio today, and they had had the audacity to correct the grammar! The line had been changed to: "I'd be safe and warm / If I were in LA". Now I know I'm a grammar pedant, but I was shocked by this - what is the world coming to when you can't leave alone a perfectly singable lyric of a classic song?

And a thought to comfort me:

Talking to yourself; a sign of madness.
Not talking to yourself; a sign of blandness.

Performance Art Wednesday

Today's blog entry is brought to you via MP3, in deference to the meme that is going around today.

However, with a new twist on audioblogging, I've decided to take on the challenge of providing links along with the blog post in question. This is how it's going to work: below is the list of links that are referred to in the audio file. Each link consists of the phrase that prompts the link, and has next to it the time in the audio file at which the phrase occurs, so that it's easier for people to follow along.

When you hear the phrase, click on the relevant link for a complete interactive audioblog experience! Should you wish to explore the link further before continuing to listen to the blog post, I recommend that you make use of the Pause button on your MP3 player software.

If you can't download or play the file (just over 2 minutes long, and 1MB), or are too busy or lazy to do so, don't worry. Nothing of vital importance, guaranteed!

Oh, and that's not a chainsaw starting up about halfway through (although it does sound incredibly like one) - it's just the hard drive of my MP3 player waking up.

The audio blog

The links:

• 0:02 - "AudBlog"
• 0:15 - "my nice MP3 player"
• 0:39 - "Vaughan's demand for Performance Art Wednesday"
• 0:59 - Caroline of prolific
• 1:01 - "Mike of Troubled Diva"
• 1:03 - "Meg of not so soft"
• 1:04 - "Anna of little red boat"
• 1:06 - "Vaughan of Wherever You Are"
• 1:08 - "Aquarion of Aquarionics"
• 1:09 - "D of acerbia"
• 1:24 - "The Wee Free Men"