…I want to come back as a goose who lives in a business park. The office building in which my current company nestles is situated in one of the many, identical, soulless, business parks located throughout the suburban areas of the western world. It has landscaped gardens filled with unimaginative plants and water features in an attempt to remind the employees’ subconscious’ of their raison d’etre; it’s just enough to prevent them topping themselves and thus saves money on expensive HR procedures. To be on the safe side, none of the windows open either; you wouldn’t want to mess up the shrubs at the base of the buildings with loads of human remains.

However there is one set of creatures that don’t recognise this cynical setup: Canada Geese. Every business park I’ve ever visited over here has a huge number of Canada Geese who appear to live there – usually near the water feature. All day and night they just hang-out by the lake/pond in big groups. They just seem to sit, sunbathe, swim, eat, shit and fuck all day. That can’t be bad can it ? OK, they probably don’t get healthcare, but it sounds like quite a good life to me.

It’s quite reassuring to know that public transport [mass transit] in Philadelphia competes favourably with London Transport in many ways, including price, coverage and quality of on-board loony. As a simple and wholly unscientific measure – what we social scientists call “qualitative” – I would like to document two quality bus nutjobs I’ve encountered since I moved to the colonies.

The most recent bus-barmpot was encountered during today’s hour-long commute home. A lady sitting a few rows behind me was talking into an invisible mobile phone to a wide assortment of characters. Her voice was so obnoxious and cartoon-like that I spent half the journey getting annoyed that one of the loud, feisty, girls, who always sit at the back of the bus, were so insistent on doing a comical impression of a rancorous old bat for so long. In fact, it wasn’t until I watched them leave the bus that I realised that the voice couldn’t possibly originate from them.

I’ve no idea who the people were on the other end of that imaginary phone, but whoever they were, she felt very, very strongly about the way they were living their lives, and was only too happy to impart her worldly advice to them in extremely frank terms. She was clearly not a member of “the politically correct lobby” either; she was telling them straight in as overtly racist, sexual, homophobic and crude language as was obviously necessary to convey her strength of feeling to the callers.

SEPTA buses are one of the few places in Philadelphia where you get to see some real cultural diversity and so this barking-mad wrinkly could have been in trouble. However, she was so obnoxiously mental that, after a period of mass adjustment, the most she managed to educe from the weary throng was the occasional snigger.

Prior to this, the best nutter I have observed on mass transit over here was during Ralph’s stay. We were two stops into a bus journey to Center City [on the 9 for bus nerds] when an ebullient chap, wearing a brightly coloured baseball cap and sporty t-shirt climbed the stairs. He was obviously a local celebrity because he knew everyone! Well, he certainly appeared to know the driver and the few people in the front seats because he was having a right laugh with them all about something or other. OK, he was doing most of the laughing and joking, but then that’s what people like about tubby men: they are so happy. He was also wearing shorts, white socks and bright trainers.

At the next stop, a tall skinny man wearing a Phillies t-shirt took a seat near by our hero. Being very observant, our man immediately noticed the Phillies t-shirt and used it as the basis of a conversational opening gambit. He was also wearing a bum-bag [fanny-pack].

“Oh you like the Phillies ? I had a room mate that liked the Phillies. But they really are bad aren’t they ? I mean, they’re the worst!” offered our colourful friend to the Phillies supporter. He continued:
“Like, they could play against the worst team in the worst league and you know what ? Actually, they could play against a girls’ school. They could play against the worst team in a girls’ school. No, they could play against the worst team in the worst girls’ school in the country and you know who would win ? You know who would win ?”
Concerned that the Phillies supporter may have thought this was a rhetorical question, he asked again:
“Who would win jya think ? Who do you think would win ?”
“The girls ?” replied the Phillies supporter through gritted teeth with the vague hope that this cock with the shiny face would fuck off if he gave him the answer he wanted to hear.
“Yeah! The girls would beat the Phillies!” explained our voluntary fantasy-baseball pundit.

At this point I looked away because something nasty was clearly going to happen if this dickhead didn’t shut his gob. But he didn’t shut his gob. And he kept up a barrage of bullshit for the entire duration of the journey. Even when everyone around him had been staring at their shoes for at least ten minutes, he still continued his monologue – he just stared into space while he was doing it. One topic that he seemed obsessed with was the fact that he’s “not allowed to drive.” Despite that meaning we all have a risk of bumping into him on a bus in the future, it also means he won’t be driving…which made everyone feel a lot better about life.

Last night my friend Kevin played a gig in South Philly supporting Christian Death. As Kevin is my best, and arguably my only, friend on this side of the pond, I was anxious to see him play. However, being in my late 30s and being a bit porky, and needing to use public transport, and it being over 85F, and the venue being in a scary part of town with no public transport, and me being knackered, and because I had to get up early the next day to get into work on the bus because Walter’s aircon is still not fixed, I ended up crying off just as my bus crawled into the Wissahickon Transport Centre. The traffic was as bollocksome as it could have been and by the time I’d sweated into South Philly it would have been Friday.
Fortunately, as I found out today, the gig turned out to be sub-par and so it’s fortunate that I opted to stay at home with the flock instead. The only worry is that we’ve been doing a lot of that recently: staying at home. These days I prefer it…how sad.
The hugely inconvenient commute to work, which I share with a bunch of other bus regulars, amazes me more than ever. Why are we doing this ? Spending 3 hours a day of our lives traveling to and from somewhere we dislike, in order to spend 8 hours doing something we’d rather not be doing. In London this depressed the hell out of me, but for some reason that is not understood, I’m currently ok with it. Perhaps it’s a combination of the joy of uninterrupted reading time, aircon, a challenging job, and effective anti-depressants that’s doing it. If I should lose one of those benefits then it might be time to resort to drastic measures. But, at this moment, the thought of going in to work on Monday isn’t filling me with dread and annoyance…even though it should be! Why do we do this ? Anyone who thinks that it’s because a day job is a necessary evil, or that work makes you a real person, is a tragic fool. There’s no dignity in working too hard, it’s just pathetic. If you do work too hard you will never be wealthy in any sense of the word. Some people find that work gives their lives structure and a purpose; these days I pity them. A few years ago I would have concurred and tried to justify working my weekends out for no extra pay or credit. Now I just see it as blinkered ignorance.
Skive for fucks sake, skive! Spend some time with people you like! What’s wrong with wanting to spend the majority of your waking time doing something you enjoy rather than something that you do because you “have” to.

What am I talking about…

Right – the weekend is ahead and therefore some pleasure:

• Not working
• Speaking to my family on the Internets
• Reading more of my books
• A barbecue
• A curry
• Playing with my new Technics 1200 (mk2) that a very generous workmate gave me
• Listening to some nice sounds
• Sitting in the sahn with nothing better to do
• Reviving my old iBook
• Enjoying my flock

Nighty night!

So many things to talk about but I’m too knackered to bother…for the benefit of my memory, here is a list of stuff I don’t want to forget:

• The spice-warehouse/analog-recording-studio/house of friendly drunks in need of a lift to a gig where one of them is supposed to be sound engineer despite being legless.
• The comic fair.
• The oppressive, humid, hellish, nightmare heat.
• The bike race and associated drunken partying.
• Quality time showing Philly off to Frances and Marshall (my excellent sister and her excellent boyfriend.)

It has been hot here. Hot! Too hot for comfort. Regularly over 100F (they still use Fahrenheit in the colonies) with 100% humidity. It’s a nightmare, or rather it would be a nightmare if we didn’t have the beautiful, sexy, dripping, oozing, purring, air-conditioners. I love those things. In fact I love them so much that Michele keeps getting jealous. But they are so gorgeous! I want them all at the same time. Oh Jesus England, you don’t know what you’re missing.

One day I’ll write something worth reading.

There’s an interesting story on the BBC Newspod about a newly discovered, indigenous, isolated tribe in Brazil. Aerial photos of the tribe show them firing bows and arrows towards the plane containing the photographers. It would seem that they’ve never made contact with the outside world and were therefore quite perturbed by the sight of a plane. The BBC reporter asked the “expert” they’d wheeled out, what the tribes-people would have thought the plane was. After admitting that he didn’t know he proffered:

…they might think of them as a spirit of some sort, or a large bird…

“How primitive”, we jeer smugly! Fancy thinking that a plane is a big bird or some sort of spirit when it’s just a simple flying machine. Who’d have thought there were places in the world where people believe all of that archaic nonsense ?

Next on Radio 4, a debate about whether creationism should be taught in schools.

As with the other more poncey areas of America, Philadelphia is getting into tea. But there are several institutional barriers that they are going to have to contend with:

• No-one here owns an electric kettle. I know! So they either boil their water on the hob or they use a “water heater”. The latter does indeed do what it says on the can, but as any tea aficionado knows, the water needs to actually be boling when it hits the tea.
• The teabags here are mostly shite. Surprisingly the “Liptons” brand is still alive and well here, but the tea they produce is startlingly weak.
• You can get ordinary British tea here like PG and Tetley, but who wants that ? Even if you did want it, you wouldn’t find a place that serves it with proper boiling water.
• Getting any sort of proper Assam, Darjeeling or even Ceylon Tea is really, really hard. Twinings have a presence over here, but they call themselves “Twinings of London” and have “London” in a wanky copper plate type font. They also don’t sell proper tea here – it’s all flavoured crap with poncy names!

The happy news is that good tea is available but for a premium. But it really is good! A colleague in my last job gave me some tea as a leaving present that was not only genuinely from Darjeeling, but it was your pukka, first-flush, S.F.T.G.F.O.P. tea, that I never thought I would ever encounter. Lovely.

On a totally different topic, DD-WRT really does appear to be the dogs bollocks! Even on a crappy VxWorks Linksys V8 WRT54G router it does the business. We have our VoIP utterly QoS’d and I’m feeling quite happy about that. If that sounds like Latin to you then be grateful you have a life.

If there’s one thing that annoys the most pedestrian of the middle classes, it’s when they find a badly used apostrophe. In reality, they don’t hate it at all; they love it! It gives them a sense of superior smugness; that they have managed to understand a simple rule that someone else hasn’t. They can then bang on about how poorly educated most people are these days – the subtext of which is how intelligent they are.
Enough please! The apostrophe is an anachronism and rarely, if ever, needed to convey the true meaning of text. Like the split infinitive, it is just another victim of die-hard language fascists that has not been allowed to die gracefully. Instead it has been kept alive artificially on life support for far longer than its natural or useful lifespan. If that isn’t cruel enough, the only reason for it being kept alive is just so it can be used to make people feel smug for recognising it, and thus form even deeper divisions in society.
However, there are two possible explanations for why so few people use the apostrophe correctly:

• They don’t know, because they are stupid and didn’t go to school, or went but just didn’t listen…or something.
• They went to school, heard the explanation and realised it was utterly pointless so reused the neurons for something useful – like football scores.

Re-read this post and imagine that the apostrophes weren’t there. Would you understand it ? Would you understand what I meant by “werent” ? In fact, if you spot an apostrophe-related error in this post, would you get confused ?
When you see a fruit and veg seller mark-up the price of “Banana’s” are you really, genuinely, confused by what they mean ? Do you really think the vendor is claiming that the curved, yellow, fruit are owned by someone called “Banana” ? This is a rhetorical question, because if you really tried to answer it then you should not be questioning the intelligence of others. In fact you should be seeking psychiatric help.
So, I am starting the Society for Apostrophe Deprecation (SAD) to campaign for a dignified death for the archaic apostrophe.
Next week, “i before e except after c.” Tell it to their neighbours.

Long weekends in U.S. are well cherished by the natives because days-off are so difficult to come by. In traditional American style most people gratefully accept this state of affairs rather than try to fight for more time off; much like the UK now behaves in these days when liberty is regarded as a ludicrously anachronistic idea.
This particular “holiday” as it’s known here (which, in the UK, we would call a “weekend with a Bank Holiday Monday”) was particularly good because a friend and fellow Brit was on the continent and spent the weekend with us. Ralph came down from NYC on Friday night and so we did our best to expose him to as much traditional Philadelphia culture as we could in 48 hours: “center-city”, micro-brew bars that sell very good seafood, a broken bell, cheesesteaks, poncy bars, and bad driving. In fact, that’s about it.
It was very refreshing to spend some quality time with a London friend, in Philly, in the pursuit of fun.

We spent yesterday wandering around historic center-city; which basically involved sampling some very nice Belgian beers in-between a couple of minutes of conscience-salving time inspecting places where Ben Franklin used to hang out.

This morning we visited a local diner and somehow managed to persuade our guest into stuffing a cheesesteak down his throat. Sorry Ralph! I felt bad about this and so suggested, in fit of altruism, that we spend some time cleansing his polluted guts at the riverside bar of the Manayunk Brewery. It was a lovely couple of hours! Words can’t describe the pleasure of sitting on a lovely riverside bar, drinking some beautiful locally-brewed beers, followed by a walk home along the canal.

Rounded the day off with parrots, some good Chinese food (ie no MSG/salt), some red wine (natch) and the complete first series of Porridge.

The middle classes over here would, if the coverage on the radio was anything to go by, think that Obama was a dead cert for the White House. In reality, the situation is far more grim. I used to think that Obama was the best of a bad lot. But now I think he’s a genuinely good candidate, with a shocking amount of integrity, and someone who really could save America from the slow, terminal disease it’s currently suffering.
The resultant excitement makes us all forget that the war against Hillary isn’t over, and even when it is he’s still got to deal with the corruption, the dirty tricks, and the fact that America has an enormous amount of latent racism to deal with…which is odd considering that for the last 200 years it’s been a nation of immigrants.
Trying to keep up with the news from home is quite difficult. On one hand, they’ve prevented some pointless, blinkered, anti-abortion law (props to Simone on The World Service for arguing, quite firmly, on the side of righteousness) from going through, on the other hand Boris Johnson is Mayor of London…what were you thinking you London wankers ?
As it was my 37th birthday recently, Michele thought she would get me an appropriate t-shirt. She couldn’t find one in the shops, so decided to make one, and researched some suitable content. It turns out that Tom Paine also entered America on his 37th birthday (much like I did on mine) and so she went to cafepress to make me a t-shirt that says “What Would Tom Paine Do ?” Thanks bat – I love you. Not like either of us would actually compare me to Tom Paine but it’s still nice to think we had something in common.

Geeky post – move along.

The PC I shipped from the UK to the states turns out to have, as a result of my unrelenting parsimony, a PSU that *only* supports 220V. So, in a fit of reckless abandon, I bought a brand new HP bargain-bucket barrel scraper with a nice 19″ flat screen. The days of building my own are over because:

• I really can’t be arsed with all of that tedious Lego crap any more
• Building your own is now more expensive than buying new if, like me, you buy older (ie cheaper) technology. As has been mentioned before, I don’t have a lot of regard for people who insist on living on the edge
• If it doesn’t work, I can get it fixed without having to wait for the next computer fair and then trying to find the vendor
• HP kit is infinitely better than the similarly priced competition (cough…cough…Dell)

So, I took the hard drive out of my old machine (teapot), slapped it into the new one, and powered up. Bam, worked first time and came up perfectly except for sound and X – I expected that. The sound was dead easy – NVidia MCP61 uses the intel hda sound driver ; new kernel module built and installed. But the video is more of a bugger. Weirdly, the problem was with the monitor. It was widescreen and nothing I tried would give me the correct resolution. This still isn’t fixed and so the picture is big and beautiful but blurry in detail… BTW – yes I did Google the bugger out of it and no-one appears to have found a proper solution. If you have, let me know (HP w2007).
The next problem was quite surprising; the machine regularly locked up for seconds at a time, particularly when a lot of I/O was going on. Now, as someone who isn’t too bothered about performance I usually won’t care but latency problems were so pronounced that I was getting annoyed. Even giving the asterisk process top priority didn’t help. After doing some reading it became apparent that the “Completely Fair Scheduler” in modern kernels really needs to be tuned to your exact requirements for it to be of any use at all. This is the first time I’ve ever had the need to mess around with kernel tunables for my home machine; in the past the defaults were fine 90% of the time.
More reading. It turns out things are very different now. Not only are there a bunch of very useful tunables (eg vm.dirty_background_ratio and vm.swappiness)
but you can even configure ‘cgroups’ which let you assign priorities to groups of processes, even by username! So now I have a box that is neatly tuned to what we need, which is great, but who is normally going to bother ? Distributions are really going to have to take this seriously, otherwise they are going to be a lot of pissed off desktop users. Some sort of simple tuning tool with enough smarts to do the job properly.