PigPog

Long ago, Neil Dixon (@ndixon on Twitter) told the story of meeting Rolf Harris at a book signing. I asked if he’d be interested in hearing my stories of Rolf meetings. He said he would, and I never got around to writing them up to send to him. Now’s as good a time as any to do it, and I might as well post them here for others to see too…

Rolf Harris at the Aston May Ball

I was a techie at Aston. That meant I helped with running the events. Mostly, it was just carrying gear in and out – I wasn’t as knowledgeable on setting up sound or light gear as many others, but I could lift and carry fairly well, and I was geeky enough to remember the names of lots of types of cables.

It was May Ball time. Several venues, several hired in PAs, along with all of our own sound and lighting rigs. Multiple bands and other acts in each venue. Bars everywhere around the main university building and the Guild (our Students’ Union). It was a big event for the techies, starting one morning, and finishing early the next. We worked shifts, a couple of hours at a time.

I finished a shift just before Rolf was due to play the Guild’s main hall. As my shift was coming to an end, I was looking forward to a break and a beer or two.

Rolf’s stage manager had told me various bits about what would happen at different times, and who needed to go where. My plan was to pass this information on to whoever was going to be working next, but it soon became obvious that wouldn’t work. There were too many odd bits of information, and too many people that now knew who I was, and didn’t need me suddenly disappearing and leaving them wondering who they were supposed to be dealing with. I realised I was stuck there until after Rolf’s show.

I wasn’t especially looking forward to it. Yes, I had fond memories of Rolf’s shows from childhood, but I was now a student. This evening wasn’t about cartoons, or guessing what someone was painting.

I stood in the wide doorway leading to the stage, leaning my back against the door frame on one side, head hung, worn out.

Someone joined me, leaning on the other side, with the two of us pretty much blocking the doorway.

I looked at their feet. I counted them. Twice.

There were three.

That was unusual. Most people have two. A few have one.

Only Jake the Peg had three.

A smile started to creep across my face as I slowly looked up at Rolf, standing in the doorway with me, maybe two or three feet away.

Then, right in front of me, he started singing Jake the Peg, and doing his strange three-legged dance.

The smile won, and I was happy to stay for the rest of the show.

He went on stage to a huge crowd of screaming students, and could silence them in a second. People who yelled abuse were cut down quickly, as he taught a crowd of mostly English youngsters to say ‘barstard’ properly, instead of the pathetic ‘fat bastad’ some people were yelling.

He seems to be able to do this anywhere – Sam and I saw him years later at Rock City in Nottingham, and even there people played along with his games, and sang along with Stairway to Heaven.

Sadly, it turned out he really wasn’t well at the time of the Aston show. Nobody watching the show would have guessed, but as soon as he was out of sight of the audience, he had to be helped back to his dressing room, barely able to walk. There wasn’t a chance for any of us to meet him after the show.

Rolf at BUGS

When I was a techie at Aston, we met up with the techies at Birmingham University (BUGS = Birmingham University Guild of Students). We set up a couple of swap-over events, where their techies came over to Aston for an event, and we went over there for one of theirs. It made for a couple of fun evenings, swapping stories. Their Rolf story was better than ours, though.

Like us, they’d had Rolf there for a show. He performed the show, then was lead back to his dressing room, where food was to be laid on for him.

A short time later, there was a knock at their office door, where the techies were all sitting around drinking and talking. They opened the door.

There was Rolf.

He asked what they were doing, and if they’d mind if he joined them. They said that was fine. He joined them in their office, telling stories and jokes, getting them all singing along with him, and drawing things for them.

He asked what they were planning on doing for food. They told him they had a pile of leftover Indian snacks from Diwali, and they were planning on heating them on a metal tray suspended over a couple of par cans (small lights, 1kw each – a lot of heat output). Rolf said that a barbie sounded much better than anything else around, and joined them.

(We tried the par can barbie later – it works well. A couple of 1kw lights quickly heat a metal tray up to a good cooking temperature. We used ours for leftover pizza.)

One of the best parts of the BUGS techie office was the door – because they sometimes had valuable stuff there, they had a steel-plated door. It looked pretty cool.

It looked even better when the full size of the door had a Rolfaroo drawn on it.

I’ve just set WordPress up to post by eMail, and this is only a test to see if it works, and if so, how. You probably want to ignore it.

Does it allow for Markdown use?

Will URLs be linked? http://www.cultpens.com

Here goes the test…

I switched from Flickr to using SmugMug for hosting my photos a few months ago, and it’s been a mixed experience.

The Good

• I now have all my photos on my own domain. I’m contributing content to my own site, rather than one owned by Yahoo!.
• I can run ads on photo pages. It doesn’t bring in a lot of money (barely anything, actually) but at least the money is coming to me.
• I can make the photo part of the site look like it’s really part of my own site, not just a link to someone else’s site.
• The photos are presented well, with nice big views, taking advantage of bigger screens well.
• It’s nice to be supporting a small family-run business, rather than a division of Yahoo! that could potentially get sold again any time.

The Bad

• It’s taken a lot of work to get things organised as I like them, and it’s still a bit odd. Every photo has to be in a gallery, and because I don’t think of photos in galleries, I’m ending up with lots of tiny galleries, often with only one or two photos in them.
• I can set up ‘smart galleries’, which pick up on keywords, and fill themselves automatically. I’ve used this for gathering pictures of specific things, or taken in specific places, and it’s really nice and flexible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work reliably. Photos rarely appear in the galleries they should straight away. Sometimes they never do, unless you edit the gallery settings, and save them again. It means I can’t set this stuff up then just forget about it.
• Searching works well. Sometimes. Other times, it’s frustratingly slow. At the moment, I’m looking for a picture of a cup of coffee, but every time I search, I get a ‘gateway timeout’ error.
• Although SmugMug does have some social features, it lags a long way behind Flickr. There aren’t as many features, there aren’t as many users to interact with, and the users there tend not to use the social aspects. Even without taking part in Flickr recently, I’ve had photos ‘favorited’, and had comments posted. Not a single photo has been given a ‘thumbs-up’ (or down) on SmugMug. I’ve had one comment, but that was just a stream of abuse that I deleted straight away.

The Ugly

• Since ditching Flickr, they’ve released a beta version of their new photo page, and it works much better than the old one. It solves most of the problems.
• When returning to Flickr, it’s quite startling just how quick everything is, and how it all just works.
• Flickr is cheaper. By more than any ad revenue is ever likely to bring me.

The Conclusion

I haven’t reached one yet, but ditching SmugMug and returning to Flickr is feeling increasingly likely. I like SmugMug, and there are features there, but not on Flickr, that pros probably need. I don’t. It’s making uploading photos feel more like a chore.

I’ll probably start uploading all my recent photos to Flickr again, and see how things go from there. Unfortunately, my Mac is currently out of action, waiting for a new hard drive, so I’ll have to wait until it returns.

I came up with this recipe when I was a student, which probably tells you most of what you need to know about it.

I had a big bag of rice. One day, I found I had no money, and nothing in to eat. In the fridge, I had a jar of Marmite and a jar of English mustard. I like mustard. I bought the Marmite with the intention of trying to like it, but I failed.

I decided I’d better come up with a recipe that used Marmite, mustard and rice. So Marmite and Mustard Fried Rice was born.

Most people have been pleasantly surprised on tasting it, though it usually comes under the heading of ‘not bad’ rather than being a gourmet delight. It’s easy and cheap, though, so it was good student fuel.

I usually use basmati rice, but long grain should be fine too.

Cook as normal. For basmati rice, I just cook one cup of rice per two cups of water – the measure you use doesn’t matter, as long as it’s 2:1 by volume. As you start boiling the rice, add Marmite and mustard. I generally use a generous spoon of each, but it depends on how much rice you’re making, and how strong you want the flavours to be. A reasonably generous amount of Marmite is important, as it helps the textures later.

Boil until the rice is done, stirring often to make sure the Marmite and mustard mix in well. Get a pan heated up as it’s finishing. Either a frying pan or a wok will do the job, with a little oil.

Chuck the rice in the frying pan/wok. Pat it down, and let one side cook well, then flip it over. You’re aiming to get quite a bit of the rice to go crispy.

Once both sides are crispy, serve it. If you’re doing a lot, and it’s quite thick, you may want to break it up to get the crispy bits mixed into it, then cook it again, so more of the rice is crispy.

Serve with the beer you’ve been able to afford because you spent so little on food.

I’ve enjoyed having a Mac, ever since I made the switch. Now, though, my Mac is unwell. I’ve booked in at the Apple store to take it in – I think it needs a new hard drive. Until then, though, I only have my old Windows XP Tablet PC. It’s quite old, and slow, with a small screen, and no access to any of the data on my Mac’s hard drive, or any of the external drives I used.

So. How’s that working out for me?

Surprisingly well, really. It’s not pleasant, but it’s usable for a while. I think I miss the hardware more than the software, though I certainly prefer Mac OS to Windows XP. The screen is so small and so low down that I’m feeling the risk of neck ache, and it doesn’t feel good for my eyes. I’ve been spoiled with that 24″ screen, though!

One of the first things I did was to install ResophNotes, which gives me access to my writing and ‘thinking’ space – the same data I’d normally access through Notational Velocidy on the Mac. I have DropBox, so many of my current files are still available. Although I use Apple’s Mail app for my email, it’s all stored in Gmail, so I can just open a browser tab and I have my email all up to date. I’m a little in limbo at the moment for calendars, but Google Calendar is currently my ‘master’, so I have that available.

I keep my notes in Evernote, so I just updated that to the latest version and let it sync. I’m using the web version of Twitter instead of the Tweetie (or Twitter official) client. My tasks are all in Remember The Milk, so they’re online anyway.

I had access to all of my most important data very quickly.

I’m still missing all the data on my external drives. Windows would be able to access them if they weren’t in Mac OS Extended format, but that would mean I wouldn’t be able to use Time Machine to keep them backed up. And since it’s Time Machine that means I’ll be able to bring my Mac home with a new hard drive and get it back up and running to pretty much where I was, I’m happy with the trade-off.

• Update, July 2011: I lost this torch, and replaced it with a slightly bigger and brighter Fenix. This one turned up a couple of weeks later, and now Sam uses it. Still a great little torch.

Torches are always a compromise. The smallest ones are never very bright, and the brightest ones are hardly convenient to carry around. Things have moved on a lot in recent years, with big improvements in LEDs, and better use of lithium and rechargeable batteries, but the compromises are still there. Unless you’re really quite geeky about your gadgets, or you have specific needs (like camping, or walking home after dark) you probably won’t care much what sort of torch you have.

I wanted a torch that was brighter than the one I was using, but not too big. I was willing to carry something bigger, as long as it wasn’t too inconvenient. At that point, I was using a small Fenix torch, that used a single AAA battery. It was small enough to slip almost unnoticed into a pocket, and was surprisingly bright for its size. We live in a 3rd floor (4th to those in the US) flat, with an external metal staircase, so it’s handy to have some light when climbing them on winter nights.

After a bit of reading and thinking, I ended up with the Fenix P2D Premium Q5, which I’ve been very happy with. It’s probably expensive enough to horrify many people, but more expensive torches are available too. Add in the excuse of using some birthday money (or whatever excuse I actually added in to the mix – I forget), and an expensive torch starts to look like a sensible purchase. Maybe not to you, but to a geek like me trying to justify a new toy.

I’d read that it was the size of a thumb. It’s about the width of my thumb, but a bit longer. It fits very neatly in my fist, not sticking out at either end. It’s light enough than holding and carrying it doesn’t feel like an effort. It’s big enough, though, that it would take up a significant amount of space in an already part-filled pocket. It came with a little pouch on a belt loop, so that’s how I carry it, on my belt next to my Swiss Army knife. I can have it in my hand in about one second, so it’s not much hassle to reach for it.

It’s very easy and comfortable to have in hand. In a pocket, it would be quite small on its own, but it’s quite a big thing to add to a pocket that’s already fairly full. For those times when sticking a torch in your mouth is the easiest way to work with both hands, it’s usable, but a bit bigger than you’d want to chew on for too long.

Brightness is even more difficult to describe, but it’s quite impressively bright. On full brightness, when standing on the stairs outside our door, it can light up the ground three floors below quite well. It can light up the houses two long gardens away behind our building. The houses across the street from them, too, but not very noticeably. When standing, it can show up on the ground quite well in daylight, and if I shine it at a 100W light bulb, the bulb throws a clear shadow on the ceiling, even when turned on. It’s 180 lumens, if that helps any.

On full brightness, though, it has two limitations:

• It only lasts for one hour on a battery. Since they’re expensive lithium batteries, burning through one in an evening would be a problem. That’s not so likely to happen, though, because of the second limit:
• After ten minutes of use, it gets hot enough that Fenix warn that the torch or battery could be damaged. It becomes quite uncomfortable to hold.

With a small twist of the top section, though, it drops from ‘turbo’ mode to ‘general’ mode. Gentle presses of the power switch will then switch between three more power levels, giving between 2 hours of use and 30 hours of use from the same battery. Even on the lowest setting, it’s painful to look into the beam, and quite bright enough to see your way around in the dark.

It has a couple of other tricks, too:

• In turbo mode, it can also be set to strobe – very fast flashing of the full power light. Not much use day to day, but you can see why it might be useful for law enforcement and military. In a dark environment, it’s quite disorientating.
• In general mode, the same setting (an extra gentle press of the power button) sets SOS mode – it flashes the morse code for SOS. Probably not very useful halfway up the stairs to a flat in Tiverton, Devon, but could be a nice feature to have if you’re buying it for camping or hiking.

I bought mine from Heinnie Haynes, and I’ve always found them good. It looks like the P2D isn’t a current model any more, but the PD20 looks very similar, so is probably the replacement.

I bought the Fenix Diffuser Lantern at the same time, which is a useful accessory. It’s just a single piece of plastic that fits over the end of the torch, spreading it’s light in all directions. Sam has used it a few times in place of a lamp at her side of the bed, but it would be a very useful camping accessory.

I also stocked up on the NexTorch CR123A batteries, which makes the torch much cheaper to run. At a rough estimate, I seem likely to get through around three or four batteries a year, so the 12-pack will last a long time.

Unless you either obtain some geeky delight from a torch, or go about the sort of activities that really require such standards of light output, you’re unlikely to want to shell out for a torch like this one. If you do fall into either of those categories, though, it’s a very nice little tool/toy. I have no real need for it, but I love it anyway.

I’m not really much of a gamer. I play a bit, but it’s generally ‘casual’ games. I don’t have a console, and I don’t think it would be worth buying one for the bit of gaming I might do. A Wii » [ | : UK, US] might be worthwhile, but we’d have to buy a TV to go with it first, and that’s quite a bit of money.

When I switched to Mac some time ago, I was prepared for the fact that there weren’t as many games available. Before that I’d been using a tablet PC with no CD or DVD drive, which would have been enough to stop many games from working anyway. Age of Empires is the only ‘real’ game I’ve played much of, and even that probably averages out to less than one game every couple of weeks.

All that said, I was still quite glad to see the arrival of Steam for Mac, with a bunch of new games available, and more to follow. Even better, to celebrate the launch, they’ve made Portal free for both Mac and PC for a couple of weeks. Portal is similar to the old platform games we used to play back in the days of 8-bit home computers, but with a big twist. It’s fully 3D, from a first-person perspective. Imagine a first-person shoot-em-up like the old Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Unreal Tornament, etc; but instead of running around shooting anything that moves, you’re walking around completing a series of puzzles. In the early stages, at least, there’s very little real peril. Nothing is trying to kill you, and you’ll work the puzzle out eventually. In the stages I’ve reached now, though, things are getting a little more dangerous, with a few ways to die.

The result, for me at least, is a more fun experience. The puzzles are cleverly built, and there’s sometimes more than one way to beat them. It’s very immersive, and takes a bit of thought.

Steam itself seemed quite flaky at first, crashing several times as I tried to have a look around the store. It was updated the next day, though, and again the day after, and seems much better already. I’ve heard elsewhere that this is fairly common with Steam and their products – lots of problems for the first day or two, but they quickly fix things.

I’m eying up my next Steam purchase already (I suspect Civilization IV is my kind of game), but it’s well worth taking the chance to get Steam and Portal while Portal is free.

I’ve done a bit of cutting down on what I keep running on my Mac recently.

I used to keep lots of apps running all the time – email, Tweetie, Evernote, iTunes, Transmission, Google Chrome. All running, all the time, even overnight. Chrome always had a few tabs open – PigPog’s dashboard, Facebook, Google Reader, and usually a few things that I might decide to do something with at some point. It was a land of distractions, and things ground to a halt when I tried to run Aperture.

I installed iStat Menus, after reading about it in Smoking Apples. Aperture ran, and all my RAM was used. MacOS paged furiously out to disk, but couldn’t really keep up. Aperture would hang when building previews, sometimes for hours on end.

I tried closing almost everything else, but it didn’t help much.

I finally got around to testing the two 2Gb memory modules I’d removed when one became faulty, found out which one it was, and put the other back in. My Mac now had 3Gb rather than 2Gb.

I ran Aperture. It quickly used over 2Gb RAM all on its own, finished the processing it was doing, and shrank back down to around 200Mb. Just as it should. Looks like the problem was that with 2Gb of RAM, doing that just took a lot of paging in and out, and so, a lot of time.

By then, though, I’d taken a bit of a liking to having less stuff sitting open. I do quite like to see emails when they arrive (I don’t get many at home, so it’s not much of a distraction), but I don’t always need the Tweetie window there on show. iTunes doesn’t need to be running when my iPod isn’t actually syncing. Evernote doesn’t need to be running all the time, though it’s quicker to throw things into it if it is. Mail can at least be closed overnight.

As for the browser, I’m trying to make it a habit to leave it running, but with no windows actually open. That way, it’s very quick to start if I click a URL somewhere, or want to have a quick look at Facebook. The rest of the time, though, there’s no need to keep things open. I just need to check for any spams or comments on PigPog once or twice a day, and look at Facebook occasionally. Google Reader doesn’t need to be checked obsessively – just looked at sometimes. When I want to.

So far the results are good. I’m spending less time repeatedly checking the same sites and feeds several times an hour. The only problem is staring at the relatively blank screen, and wondering what to do next. I decided to write. I’m writing this now.

Producing some sort of output, rather than staring at Facebook and Twitter for an hour – sounds like an improvement to me.

I used to use Aperture 2 for all my photos. Recently, though, I’ve taken to only using it for pics from my DSLR (Nikon D90 » [ | : UK, US]), and using iPhoto for shots from my compact (Panasonic Lumix FX-550 » [ | : UK, US]). I’ve found myself taking many more shots with the compact, and don’t normally carry the Nikon any more.

That means that for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively used iPhoto.

When Aperture 3 appeared, it seemed to mix the benefits of Aperture with those of iPhoto, so I grabbed the trial version to have a go.

First impressions were quite good. I imported my iPhoto library, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Then I imported my Aperture library.

Except I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to now for two weeks. Each attempt means leaving it to work all day, or overnight. Every time I return, Aperture has crashed part way through. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to continue from where it left off.

There’s been an update from Apple, which addresses just the sort of problems I’ve been having, but it hasn’t helped matters for me.

I even decided to give up on that, and just import the original images again from scratch, losing all the metadata and edits. That crashed somewhere in the middle, too.

This morning, I wanted to post a picture of my breakfast. I opened Aperture 3. It decided it had to process some images and face data in the background, and wasn’t usable while it was doing that. I opened iPhoto and imported the images. Aperture finished it’s background jobs, so I told it to close. I was most of the way through editing and posting the images in iPhoto before Aperture actually got around to closing.

I gather there are some really nice improvements in Aperture 3, but so far, I can’t get to the point where I might care.

The chunk of cold weather we’re having here in the UK at the moment is a bit of a problem for the birds. They’re having difficulty finding enough food. We wanted to help, but we have a bit of a problem – we live in the top flat in an old four-storey school building. We get to our door by climbing a set of metal steps on the outside of the building. Our outside space consists of a few square metres of metal panelling, with metal railings around it, and a long drop.

Feeders are available that attach with suction cups to the outside of a window, which seem like a good idea, but I’m not sure I trust them. For a normal house, if it falls off, you just have to go outside, pick it up, and stick it back in place. If one fell off our living room windows, it would fall four floors down, and land in a cut-out section below ground level, outside the basement flat’s front windows. Or, if it bounced a bit further forward by hitting the window sill, it could fall far enough forward to land on someone’s car.

Anyway, I hit on a solution last weekend – part of the packaging from our new microwave, some holes punched through with my Swiss Army Knife, and a couple of shoelaces:

It sat there firmly, and the food (a slice of bread and some seeds) didn’t blow away. Win. The birds, however, didn’t know it was there. Fail.

My boss had a good suggestion, though – add a couple of hanging bird feeders, and not only do we add more options for food, but we put something there the birds might actually recognise as a source of food. A white polystyrene tray probably isn’t going to say ‘food’ to a chaffinch, but a swinging tube of peanuts might. So, this weekend, we visited Pets at Home, and stocked up. Here’s the result:

Some food on the tray, and three hanging feeders, containing:

• Peanuts, with a spare bag ready for refills.
• Mixed seeds, with sunflower hearts to replace them when they’re gone.
• Fat balls, with a large tub full of replacements ready.

There’s only one problem with this now. You may notice the lack of snow – it’s pretty much all thawed here, and there doesn’t appear to be too much risk of more to come. We may be a bit late, but hopefully they’ll still enjoy a few treats.