Sunday is usually the day I spend on the sofa with a laptop and some birds, while M is at work. The day passes surprisingly quickly but I usually end up feeling slightly sad: Sunday sad, combined with a tinge of regret that the weekend has been wasted.

This Sunday I had a day trip to New York City, where East-Anglia-K8 and her sister were on holiday; ostensibly they were there to attend Rock The Bells (which was as spectacularly awesome as it sounds), but they’d never been here before so it was a chance to soak up some juice from the Big Apple.

Now, if you’ve never been to NYC the one thing you need to know is that it is a truly spectacular city. All of the hyperbole and gushing that traditionally accompanies descriptions of the city are utterly and totally justifiable. As a result non-New-Yorkers, most notably Philadelphians, are quick to slag it off. Ignore them. New York is the archetype of canine testes, and the first time you see it in person you want to record every building, person, smell and sound. Like London, the more you get to know it, the more you realise you don’t know and the more bizarre, exciting, and pleasurable it becomes. I love it. Wouldn’t want to live there, but I love it. Apparently it’s a common feeling.

The Megabus has been around in Britain for a few years but I’ve never tried it; it always sounded like a scam. But since it made its way to the colonies, I’ve heard first-hand tales of wonder that imply it’s actually as good as it suggests. And it is! With a single day’s advance booking I got a $22 round-trip from 30th St station to 23rd and 7th in NYC…and each trip was only 2 hours; in a comfortable, air-conditioned, free wi-fi having double-decker bus. The whole trip went like clockwork, including the blissful subway ride, which meant I met K8 and Cass at their hotel at 11am as arranged. And what a hotel! The Hudson. If you want a description, Google it or look at some of the pictures, just know it’s spectacular.

It’s always weird and wonderful to see friends and family from England out-of-context, over here – and always makes me nostalgic. But we had a most excellent day. Even though it was 93 degrees, miraculously the humidity was low and so it was actually bearable! We wandered around, had a row with a bunch of Tottenham-Court-Road-style crooks, went up The Eiffel TowerThe Empire State, had a selection of drinks in SoHo, Greenwich Village and in mid town, and generally had a gay old time.

Despite being a single day, it was so far removed from the normal working life, in retrospect it felt like a week-long holiday.

Nice to be home though. I even got warm homely feelings when I saw Philly on the horizon…weird.

A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues at work was blessed with an idea that can only be ascribed to genius: “maybe a few of us should chip in to buy a sandwich toaster?” This was insightful on many levels, not least of which was that we all frequently found ourselves spending a considerable amount of money buying paninis from the local foodery. After a few seconds of the googel, we noticed that a George Foreman Grill would be even cheaper than a sandwich toaster, and offer some potentially interesting options. So three of us chipped in to buy a pathetically cheap grill. We also decided to collectively buy some ingredients for some proper grilled sandwiches.
If you’ve never had a sandwich full of deliciously poncey cheeses, meats and spices, that is heated on a George Foreman grill, then you will never understand the joy we experience every day of the working week.
Initially, the three of us that decided the communal grill was a good idea brought in a variety of breads, cheeses, lunch meats, mustards and spices. The others regarded us with a mixture of scepticism, and irritation (we tend to dominate the kitchen) but occasionally we would be asked how much a “share” in the operation would cost. So we declared it “The Peoples Grill”, stenciled a hammer and sickle on it, and offered its services to anyone who had ingredients.
And so, lunch has transformed into a beautiful collective celebration of grilled deliciousness. This week we shared:

• Black forest ham
• Smoked swiss cheese
• Aged, peppered swiss cheese
• Jelapeno, wasabi and spiced mustard
• Brie
• Smoked salmon

The brains behind the collective grill also coined a phrase for those of us grillers with culinary aspirations: Fourmets. Looks like we’re going to need a bigger grill.

For over a week now I have been stuck at home in quarantine after picking up a dose of viral conjunctivitis from fuck-knows where. It doesn’t really matter once it’s diagnosed because there’s nothing that can be done about it (it’s a virus), and it’s as contagious as any other massively contagious virus. You (I) just have to wait it out. The progress is very slow, and until I’m back to normal, going to work is a no-no; giving this out to people with kids would be like injecting everyone at work with the lurgi(sp?). So I’ve been under a self-imposed house-arrest for the last week, and as comfy as this sofa gets I’m feeling pretty frustrated. Fortunately, being a programmer there is very little (if anything) required by my job that can’t be done from home nowadays. Obviously that does raise the question of the efficacy of commuting at all – but that’s an issue for other posts. But no matter how much one hates one’s cube and office-space, two weeks of house/sofa can make it seem positively enticing – I’m even missing the bus.

Still, as the blur has worn off over the past few days I’ve been able to work and also watch some TV (curse you 24 for being genuinely quite entertaining). On Saturday night our neighbours were having a small party/band/happy-thing out the back of their house. Being a leper I couldn’t attend and so Michele went without me while I watched 3-4am in Jack Bauer’s crap first big day of aggro.

After a short while, Michele thought it may do me good to socialise with the good people of across-the-road, and so, despite being contagious, and despite it being dark out, we went over for half-an-hour or so…while I wore dark glasses (like a big arse) and refused to shake anyone’s hand. It was lovely to get out of the house and talk to people though – and Brendan’s band were truly awesome in a jazzy-mellow way (poorly-lit videos to follow).

In a nutshell, being under house arrest does suck…but not that much. I’d rather be confined to my sofa with Bat, Birds, Roku et al for a couple of weeks, than in a small, confined, prison cell, full of my old crap, for several years.

Goodnight.

Geeks only (you have been warned)

Regardless of how fun and friendly a development environment may be, the bullshit accompanying it can ruin everything. For example, and completely at random, let’s compare iPhone development to Qt development.

X-Code (the iPhone/Mac dev IDE) is at the usable and comfortable end of my IDE spectrum. Objective C is by far my favourite programming language, and the Apple run-time systems are luxurious (mmmm…Quartz and OpenGL). The IDE is free (as in beer).

Qt provides an IDE even less objectionable than X-Code, that will let you build, test, debug and produce code on multiple devices. It prefers C++ (which I generally hate), but makes it usable, secure, and viable, via its own well-designed API. BTW – the boost/STL advocates out there are free to go and fuck right off with the .NET developers. It’s also free (as in beer and speech).

Where the iPhone experience fails (IMO) is with all of the extra crap you have to do to run an app on it: developer profiles, provisioning profiles, distribution profiles etc, etc, are a tortuous pastime, even for someone like me who knows and loves encryption. It’s a tremendous hassle and provides almost zero advantages. It also provides a million unhelpful and foggy error messages that are totally impossible to understand unless you were in the team that developed the API.

For example, who cares if my app does evil things to people’s phones when the OS itself is so poorly protected that simply visiting a website can silently cause your phone to be utterly hacked by someone else.

[anyone wishing to point out that other OS’s are/have been affected by similar bugs need to realise that I am slagging off the TSA-style security theatre of the apple code-signing bullshit which is still vulnerable to perfectly ordinary attack vectors]

A few blogs ago I may have mentioned reading Keith Allen‘s autobiography. Well, now 3/4 of the way through it, I am approaching the point of stalking him out of sheer admiration. The chances that you, dear reader, have even heard of him, is very low, but I’ve been a fan for many, many years; purely because of the little I knew. But reading this book made me realise that everything you could imagine about Keith Allen’s wild life was wrong…he was waaay more wild and righteous in real life. Not to say that he wasn’t a total arsehole from time-to-time, in fact he was! But he admits as much! OK, that doesn’t excuse him, but he’s not asking for excuses! He’s giving the reader an unedited peek into his head – faults and all.
In order to avoid turning this into a KA love-in, I’ll get to the point: one anecdote in the book is about how he made a record with the deliberate purpose of making Afro-Carribbean homophobes feel uncomfortable. As dodgy as this sounds, it was born out of the frustration of witnessing one set of unjustly oppressed people being disgusted by another. People whom he’d marched alongside in previous years attacking others for being gay clearly bewildered and irritated him – it’s quite apparent that he is as happy and confident about his own sexuality as it is possible to be.

Anyway – here is the record he made. Listen to the lyrics, and then imagine the shock and discomfort the listeners went through while he interviewed them for his pirate radio show, and asked for their opinions on it. In Notting Hill. In the 70’s.

Tickle Tune – Sex Boots Dread

My wife’s laptop runs Debian, and it’s pretty stable. But there is one issue that is proving to be a real pain: the wireless adapter – an Intel job – occasionally detatches itself from the AP for no apparent reason. Obviously this is not a good scenario and something I had to address; I hate getting support calls from home.
My “solution” was to write a little script for her that fixes the problem by taking the interface down and bringing it up again. Now all she has to do is type “fixtehinternets” and it’ll come back up.
Earlier today I was telling my work colleagues about this little hack, and their reaction was totally unexpected; they wanted a copy for their wives! Mr K even suggested I publish the script for the benefit of the google. So, with the caveat that it’s a piece of crap, here is the valuable code:

#!/bin/sh
echo "O HAI! I CAN HAS UR PASSWORDZ ?"
echo "AHM IN UR WIREZ, FIXING UR INTERNETS"
sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid "myssid"
sleep 2
sudo route add default gw 192.168.x.x
ping 158.x.x.x -c 1 >/dev/null 2>&1
[ $? -eq 0 ] && echo "YAY U HAVE ALL TEH INTERNETS!!!" || echo "O NOES! IT ARE BROKE STILL"
echo KTHXBYE

Now, you’ll either not understand a word of that, or you’ll recognise it as the quality piece of genius that it is.
Use it wisely, and not for evil.

One of the first records I remember enjoying as a kid was a version of Peter and the Wolf narrated by Frankie Howard. Thirty-nine years later I’m not only still into Prokofiev, but also Peter and the Wolf. It seems to be universally known and loved, and that means there is a seemingly limitless number of versions narrated by a vast range of stars, ranging from Sean Connery to David Bowie.

A good friend of mine, who has a bit of a vinyl habit, discovered my interest in Peter and the Wolf and has vigilantly looked out for me on his various excursions to charity shops across the nation. A couple of weeks back, he struck gold in the form of a version by Jimmy Smith. If you know Jimmy Smith you’ll probably either know this recording already or be bemused by the idea of him covering Prokofiev. But no-one who hears it could deny it is an incredible album and it’s difficult to imagine someone who didn’t enjoy at least some of it. So I ripped the deliciously well-kempt vinyl and have been playing it, almost continuously, since it arrived.

Thank you Mr Fritz.

P.S.
We witnessed a double rainbow driving back from the wildlife centre tonight. What could it mean?

Is that all there is to a political debate?

For a long while now we haven’t watched any broadcast TV. This isn’t something we’re proud of or smug about, we just haven’t. In fact the only time we turn on the cable box is when we go out and want to provide the birds with some background blather. It’s an unusual house.
There are many reasons for this, and I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say that we are still telly addicts, but we just watch stuff we have either downloaded or have access to on demand. Up until last weekend we had a little PC under the TV: it was small, cuboid, and allowed us to play any of the terabytes of content I have backed-up to our fileserver. This was great although it was expensive to run and the “silent” fans were anything but.
The combined power of alcohol, desire and the simplicity of paying for shit on the Internet caused me to order a new piece of kit that had been recommended to me by a friend. It is now my favourite thing in the whole world: Roku.

When it arrived I thought there was some sort of mistake; the box was far too small. The Roku box is a tiny little thing that allows us to watch TV unavailable on any other outlet. We can watch any of Netflix’s live material, which includes a Comcast-smashingly huge array of excellent material. For example, since installing this lovely magic box, I’ve been able to watch League of Gentlemen, a bunch of Tom Baker Dr Who, The Third Man, Willy Wonka, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy TV Series, THX 1138, Blade Runner etc etc.

There are also a load of “channels” to which you can subscribe that provide a seemingly infinite amount of content ranging from original, interesting material to TheUsualOldShit(tm). For example I’m currently listening to Pandora, which is pumping out a bunch of music it thinks (correctly for the most part) I would like.

But the best bit is that this is a relatively “open platform”; not only does it run Linux, but it has a very lightweight, free, cross-platform, development environment that allows anyone to create their own channels. The upshot of this is that I can now play my own video/music collection on it, over the network.

The idea of having original content, created by anyone, excites me. People can even charge for it if they wish and some, including Amazon, already do.

If you have a Netflix account then cancel your cable and GET ONE!

You know when you go to work, then come home, and sleep until the next day…and the only thing that keeps you going is the thought of the weekend? Well it’s not been like that for me, but Michele has been working 12 hour days recently and so it all seems quite heavy; we seem to spend so little time together. But we have found opportunities to enjoy life, and that must be a good thing, mustn’t it?
There are lots of other good things going on that I can’t blog about, but regardless my day job is currently challenging, interesting, and full of funny people, so I can’t complain.
It’s difficult not to start philosophising[en-us spell-checks don’t like the “s” there btw. Fuck them.] about growing older, but of course we all do. As you probably know, I’m a youthful 22 year old. However it turns out that Mr Passage-of-Time has ordained that despite this fact, I’m actually nearly 40; ridiculous I’m sure you agree.

• Is Microsoft Crap?
• The recent economic problems in sane and educated terms.
• Psychoville.
• Weirdly, I’ve switched from hating OOP to being a sub-classing fool.
• Our excellent neighbour and friend Brendan has been driving me to and from work in this outrageous heat…he’ll never know how much I appreciate it – I would be dead by now otherwise.
• Reading Keith Allen’s autobiography is a brilliant, funny, and fascinating way to spend time.

Night!