Archive for the ‘My Life’ Category

Tut

Posted on in My Life, The World.

Yesterday I went to see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2. First time I’d ever visited the dome in either of its incarnations. In many ways it’s a pity that it didn’t get turned into a casino-resort beacuse there’s already a lot about that reminds me of the casinos I saw in Las Vegas.

Anyway, the exhibition itself was extremely well presented and managed the important job of putting into context both stories – that of Tutankhamun himself1 and that of the discover of his tomb by Howard Carter. The level of preservation of three thousand year artifacts is incredible – not just the metal and pottery but wood, even showing the original paint colours.

Being the geek I am, I also enjoyed spotting all the Stargate references. Um, I think I may have that backwards.

1. Relatively speaking. Egypt has a lot of history2 and there was no way it could all be related here, but if you don’t come away knowing a lot more about the Eighteenth dynasty then you must have your eyes closed.

2. Only tangentially related to Tutankhamun himself, my favourite ancient Egypt fact (you may have heard this before). Cleopatra, the famous one, also the last Pharaoh of Egypt, is closer in time to us in the twenty-first century than she is to the builders of the great pyramids.

The Lord of the Rings

Posted on in Books, Media, Music, My Life, Work.

Saw The Lord of the Rings musical courtesy of work and the producers. It’s not really fair to call it a musical as it barely contains more songs than the books do, though the fight scenes are superbly choreographed to music. The producers prefer the term ‘spectacle’ and it fits that label very well. The design element is superb – Black Riders, Ents, Shelob, the Balrog are all achieved on stage in innovative but effective ways that you probably wouldn’t imagine. The use of crutches and prosthetics to distinguish the orcs may not be very politically correct but it does convey the twisted and deformed nature of their creation.

It’s quite long but still has to compress the story somewhat. The first act follows the first book reasonably closely (no Tom Bombardil, though he does get namechecked at the end, no Barrow Wights, no Glorfindel, and the Nazgul attacks on the Prancing Pony and Weathertop are combined), but after the interval things start to diverge rather more. I was starting to get suspicious when Boromir kept on talking about “The Kingdom of Men” rather than Gondor and it turned out that they had indeed combined Rohan and Gondor – and hence Theoden and Denethor, and Helm’s Deep and Pelennor Fields. Whilst this moved the plot along quite quickly it removed some of the subtlety from the story and a lot of “fan favourite” characters and scenes – no Eomer, no Eowyn, no Faramir, no Palantír, no Wormtongue, no Paths of the Dead, no Witch King. On the plus side they do, briefly, include the Scouring of the Shire.

The performances ranged from the very good to the very camp but even Malcolm Storry as an excellent Gandalf suffers somewhat in comparison with Ian McKellan in the films. In fact the hardest thing to keep in mind when reviewing or just watching the stage version is that it’s an independent adaptation of the book not the film. It aims for a very different feel – more mythic, more rooted in fairy tales, rather than the “realistic” fantasy of the films. In this sense it’s perhaps a little truer to the spirit of Tolkein even if it taks much bigger liberties with his story.

Book Meme

Posted on in Books, Doctor Who, Memes, My Life.

I was tagged by Jack on the grounds that I’ve “not done a meme for a while”.

Total Number of Books Owned

According to my LibrayThing profile, 858. I know I have at least one more to add to that list and I’d also need to subtract the 27 tagged as !borrowed or !sold. So 832. Minimum, as there may be more hiding somewhere that I haven’t added yet.

Last Book Bought

A couple of out of print role playing games from eBay. Last ‘real’ book would appear to be Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian which I found in a bookshop in Amsterdam and made Lettice buy because I’d only just bought something else there and the shop assistant was a bit on the scary side.

Last Book Read

I finished re-reading Human Nature this morning. I’ve been wanting to refresh my memory since the TV version came out. The book is bloodier and does a better job of creating the historical context. However it does have a number of elements that are really superfluous and which the TV version correctly ignored.

Five books that mean a lot to me

In reverse chronological order in my life:

  1. Life by Richard Fortey

    I bought this whilst on holiday in Tennessee visiting and so it reminds me of a great time as well as being a great book. Fortey takes a look at the history of life on Earth from the moment if started to the dawn of human history. Richard Dawkins did the same trip backwards in The Ancestor’s Tale but for me Fortey’s book is more engaging.

  2. Ships of the Star Fleet, Volume One

    Very, very geeky. But as well as being one of the best Treknical fandom works ever it’s also the first book I bought online.

  3. Thieves’ World

    I could have listed several works of fantasy or science fiction that I read during my adolesence – The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Pern novels and The Colour of Magic prime amongst them, but this collection of low fantasy stories set in a seedy city at the arse end of an empire is the one that stuck in my mind the most.

  4. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

    I was the pefect age for this when it was first published. And from this book sprung my interest in RPGs and wargames. It has a lot to answer for.

  5. Read About Me and the Yellow-Eyed Monster

    A childhood treat – a book with me and my family and my friends in it.

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

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New toy!

Posted on in My Life.
I worry that I may look like this a lot of the time...

I know own three SLRs. As well as a Canon AE1 that I bought with a student loan to replace an older model that failed to survive a fall, I have a Canon EOS 100 and, as of yesterday, a Canon EOS 10D. The last two are inherited from my father who has an even more impressive collection of hardware (I suspect that being a Canon fan is an inherited trait).

The 10D is a digital camera, my first. Yes, I’ve finally joined the twenty-first century (well sort of – my MP3 player is broken, I don’t see the point of Twitter, and I still hate mobile phones and hardly ever use mine). Though, from the look of the self-portrait over there, I belong in distinctly more paleolithic times.

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IE form post bug

Posted on in Browsers, Work, WWW.

Consider the following code:

<form action="whatever" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="foo" value="a very long string" />
<input type="checkbox" name="confirm" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>

In Internet Explorer (confirmed in both 6 and 7) submitting this form with the checkbox ticked results in no response from the server. (Submitting it without the checkbox ticked just brings you back to where you started.) No problem at all in Gecko-spawn or Opera.

Anyone seen anything like that before? And better still, got a solution?

Robin the hooded man.

Posted on in My Life, TV.

Lettice and I just watched the first two episodes of Robin of Sherwood. She had never seen it and I hadn’t seen it since it was first broadcast.

As that was over twenty years ago my memories were more than a little rose tinted (to pick one example, back when I was ten, Nasir was the coolest character on telly – he had a studded leather jacket like Avon’s and was like a ninja who hung round with Robin Hood; today I have to ask, doesn’t actually look very saracen does he?)

Comparisons with the recent Robin Hood series are hard to avoid. But I’m going to try. I’ll just say that whilst I enjoyed the new show as mindless entertainment, it doesn’t hold a candle to the old one in terms of storytelling.

We amused ourselves by putting together a dream team of characters.

From Robin of Sherwood:
Robin, Will, Little John.
From Robin Hood:
Gisbourne, Marion, Much.

Are they trying to make me angry?

Posted on in My Life.

Update to the last post.

So after a while, and with it rapidly approaching the time their customer services department go home, I call again. I get the automated welcome message, then I get through, I hear background office noises and someone typing nearby, then I hear the receiever being picked up and put down, click. I try again, same thing. And a third time. On the fourth attempt I get a recorded message telling me that the office is now closed.

Then half an hour later the consignment tracking web page is updated to tell me that the driver called at 12:18pm and as no one was there to take delivery left a card.

So let’s get this straight – I’m waiting in all day from 9am to 5:45pm, no delivery is made, and even if one was attempted no card is left. So this alleged delevery was either made to the wrong address, or not made at all. When I call customer services they can’t get through to the delivery department and so can’t do anything. When I call shortly before the close of work I get cut off three times so that customer services don’t have to speak to me and possibly work a little beyond home time. The web page for tracking my order isn’t updated until seven hours after the delievery was allegedly attempted.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to insist on the delivery being made at a time convenient to me – an evening or weekend, and that I don’t care if a manager has to delivery it himself in his own car to make that possible. I will inform the company that I bought the computer from that I will never buy anything from them again because of the quality of service from their couriers. In the future I will inform any other company who use these couriers that I won’t do business with them because of the courier service they use. I will write to the MD of the courier company informing him of the poor service I have received and informing him that I will never use his company and will never buy from any company that uses his company as couriers.

City Link – don’t use them, don’t buy from anyone who uses them.

I want my new computer…

Posted on in My Life.

Me: I was expecting a delivery today by 5:45 and it’s now gone six o’clock.
Customer Services: [takes post code and tracking number] Can you hold for a moment.
[… really bad holding music mixed in with plugs for the company …]
Customer Services: I’m sorry but I can’t get through to the delivery department at the moment.
Me: Right. [pause] So what can you do for me?
Customer Services: …
Me: Have you been having problems with deliveries in this area today?
Customer Services: I won’t know that until I can speak with the delivery department.
Me: Can you call me back?
Customer Services: [sounding relieved] Yes please. [takes number, hangs up]

WTF? I really hope the delivery depot has blown up, ‘cos otherwise there’s no excuse for missing a 9:00am to 5:45 pm window and then not answering the phone when customer services call on behalf of an irate customer.

Video Accessibility

Posted on in Work, WWW.

I’m working on a new web site that will be live for the next two or three years, hence I’m keeping an eye on both versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the WCAG guidelines. One of the things that has been requested is embedded videos (similar to YouTube) within relevant pages as opposed to having a standalone video section.

Thinking about embedded video meets accessibility and looking through WCAG 2.0 I’ve come up with the following:

To meet Priority One guidelines

  • Provide a full text based alternative to the video, i.e. a transcript plus a label explaining, more or less, “there’s a video and this is the transcript of it”.
  • Provide synchronised on screen captioning replicating the dialogure and important sounds in the video.

To meet Priority Two (our goal) guidelines

  • Provide synchronised audio description (noting changes of location, identifying speakers, etc.) in the gaps in the dialogue of the video.

To meet Priority Three guidelines

  • Provide an extended audio description that pauses the video in order to create room for extra information to be relayed aurally.

Does this agree with everyone else’s interpretation of the guidelines?

Stardates via RSS?

Posted on in Blogs, Computers, My Life.

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

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