Planet a.f.p.

Julia Jones: Book review: Masara Minase -- Lies and Kisses

Julia Jones — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:05:14 +0200

Wealthy young executive Tatsuya Soga is trying to trace the younger half-brother he hasn't seen since they were both children, when their father divorced his second wife and threw wife and child out of the house. While Tatsuya's waiting for the detective's report, he goes to a friend's bar for the evening, and has a bad case of love at first sight when he sees a young waiter playing the bar piano. Haru seems interested in him in return; which isn't surprising because as rapidly becomes clear to the reader, Haru knows who Tatsuya is and still hero-worships his adored older brother while being convinced that the Soga family must hate him. Tatsuya quite innocently proceeds to seduce Haru in the belief that the attraction is sexual on both sides, leading to much angst the next day when he finally gets that report with a recent photo and the current name of his long-lost brother...

Emotional ups and downs follow as Tatsuya tries to protect Haru from the knowledge that they're brothers, while resisting Haru's attempts to get him back into bed. It gets all the harder when he discovers the shabby conditions in which Haru lives, and feels he has to take Haru to live with him. There's more than one twist to the tale before reaching an ending that's more or less happy and leaves them together.

This is a single-volume story, so the plot's not that deep, but there's still a solid story that's got more to it than just an excuse to throw two pretty young men together and spice it up with a suggestion of incest. And it's well set up, with the nine year age gap between the men making it plausible that Tatsuya wouldn't recognise the 17-year-old he last saw as a child, and Haru having a good reason to be in that bar.

The characters are interesting and pleasant people. Tatsuya is a decent, kind man who cares about other people, and while he's pushy when he first seduces Haru, it's an honest case of mis-reading signals rather than refusing to take no for an answer. Haru's believable as a teenager who's pretending to be older than he really is, but who's still vulnerable inside. There are also some good supporting characters, in particular Haru's older step-brother from his mother's third marriage.

This one has plenty of explicit sex, but it's there to serve the story, which is good news if you find sex boring without a story to go with it. It's not as graphic as in some manga, but it's erotic as it is.

The artwork is excellent, and apart from the colour cover there are also two very nice colour plates inside. The physical production quality is extremely good, with heavy paper and crisp reproduction of the art.

The subject matter's going to squick some readers, but if you can handle that, this one's well worth a look.

Lies & Kisses at Amazon UK
Lies & Kisses at Amazon US
LibraryThing entry

Kimberley: Battersea Power Station

Kimberley — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:52:22 +0200

A bit belated on my part, but sshi has put up her photos of the iconic Battersea Power Station which four of us visited last month. The new owners had opened it to the public as part of their redevelopment proposal, thus attracting a number of enthusiasts with serious cameras, each with a lens larger than the next.

I'd often seen the building from a distance but had no idea how ruined it was. Which fool let them take part of the roof off? But it's still beautiful -- there was lots of oo-ing over the Art Deco tiles in particular.

Adrian: Starstrider customisations

Flesh-eating Dragon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:55:31 +0200

This is another post in my series about Starstrider (version 2.8); previous installments here, here, and here. Today, I just want to share the customisations I’ve made to my copy of the software.

First up, keyboard customisation, and I’ll start with manual navigation, for which I use the numeric keypad. The numeric arrow keys (”2“, “4“, “6” & “8“) cause the spacecraft to turn in the respective directions. To rotate the spacecraft anticlockwise, I press “7“, and to rotate it clockwise, I press “9“. To accelerate I press “5“, to brake I press “3“, and to decelerate I press “.” (braking and decelerating are similar but not the same: if you keep decellerating you end up going backwards).

As for view controls, my configuration is “[" to decrease field of view, "]” to increase field of view, and “`” (way over on the upper left corner of the keyboard) to flip view direction (i.e. to look behind you). I wanted backslash for this purpose but the software won’t let me. The left shift key is configured to cause the keys which normally change the travelling direction to merely change the viewing direction instead (by default this is done with numeric keypad zero).

Some other keys are assigned to functions that I don’t use (or, in some cases, prefer to toggle via the menus), so I won’t mention them. I also won’t mention the various key assignments that can’t be changed. I will mention that “*” and “/” on the numeric keypad speed up and slow down time respectively, but those are the defaults anyway.

Moving on now to space-time presets, which are customised by saving scripts to the “Presets - Space-Time” folder. I have four space-time presets, namely:

Einsteinean universe - ‘Interstellar ship’
Newtonean universe - ‘Generation ship’
Newtonean universe - ‘Interplanetary ship’
Newtonean universe - ‘Interstellar ship’

The three Newtonian universe presets have the following lines in common:

option info.lengthunit=auto info.speedunit=m/s
option space.aberration=false space.dopplershift=false

The generation ship operates in realtime, the interplanetary ship makes time flow 1,000 times faster than reality, and the interstellar ship makes time flow 100,000,000 times faster than reality. The relevant settings for the three Newtonian universe ships, respectively, are:

option space.timescale=1
option space.timescale=1.0e3
option space.timescale=1.0e8

The preset for the Einsteinean universe interstellar ship contains the following settings, which consist of measuring speeds and distances in terms of the speed of light, activating relativistic aberration and the doppler shift, and causing time to flow 1,000,000,000 times faster than reality:

option info.lengthunit=cs info.speedunit=c
option space.aberration=true space.dopplershift=true
option space.timescale=1.0e9

Incidentally, Starstrider does not provide an option for non-relativistic aberration: it’s either relativistic aberration or no aberration at all.

Now for the part you’ve been waiting for- view presets, which are customised by saving scripts to the “Presets - View” folder. I keep all of the default view presets, and have also created the following three of my own:

Custom eye view
Custom telescope
Custom star chart

One of the default view presets is “Naked eye view”, which is what I used for the illustrations in my “Location of Heaven” post (e.g. here) because when I wrote that I hadn’t yet played around with view settings much. But I find that it makes the stars look too fuzzy, and also shows too many faint stars which is impractical when I’m trying to figure out what alien constellations might look like. So I created “Custom eye view” as an alternative impression of what the naked eye sees, based on trying to simulate what the night sky actually looks like away from city lights.

It contains the following settings (I don’t actually have every setting on a different line, but the blog necessitates that):

option view.skyobjects=off
option view.fov=60.000000deg
option view.vis=6.000000
option view.sat=0.000000
option view.startype=gausslin
option view.scl=0.300000
option view.clr=0.500000

A word on the “startype=gausslin” setting. This causes stars to be displayed as unsaturated Gaussian bells with radius scaled linearly with magnitude. The Starstrider manual warns that: “this is not the impression real stars have on eyes, but it looks great“, however in my experience this is only true if the star scaling factor is large. Linearly scaled Gaussian bells look quite realistic to me provided they’re used in conjunction with a small star scaling factor (in this case view.scl=0.300000). What’s more, faint stars under the “Custom eye view” setting actually come in and out of visibility as the spacecraft’s orientation is adjusted, simulating the way that real stars seem to fade in and out of view. This seems to be an artifact of the “startype=gausslin” setting.

The “Custom eye view” preset also contains the following settings, which control the colours of various things such as star names, constellation lines, and so on (if display of such things happens to be enabled at the time). One thing these settings do is to make constellation lines and borders faint, so that when I choose to display them they have only a background prominence.

option color.starnames=rgb[0.6, 0.4, 0.8]
option color.usernames=rgb[0.2, 0.2, 0.4]
option color.skyobjectnames=rgb[1.0, 1.0, 0]
option color.constelnames=rgb[0.5, 0, 0]
option color.constellines=rgb[0.25, 0, 0]
option color.constelborders=rgb[0, 0, 0.25]
option color.planetnames=rgb[0.2, 0.8, 0.2]
option color.planetorbits=rgb[0.2, 0.4, 0.2]

The “Custom telescope” preset simulates a telescope of my own design. It contains the following settings:

option view.skyobjects=on
option view.fov=30.000000deg
option view.vis=12.000000
option view.sat=0.000000
option view.startype=gausslin
option view.scl=0.600000
option view.clr=0.500000

The “view.skyobjects=on” setting enables display of nebulae and things like that. It makes sense to turn it off for eye view and on for telescope view. The “Custom telescope view” preset also contains the following colour settings, because with greater magnification I find that labels can be made brighter without looking garish:

option color.starnames=rgb[0.6, 0.6, 1.0]
option color.usernames=rgb[0.4, 0.2, 0.4]
option color.skyobjectnames=rgb[1.0, 1.0, 0]
option color.constelnames=rgb[0.75, 0.25, 0]
option color.constellines=rgb[0.5, 0, 0]
option color.constelborders=rgb[0.5, 0.5, 0.5]

Finally, the “Custom star chart” preset is designed to simulate the star charts included in “The Macmillan Illustrated Atlas of the Universe“, which I bought quite recently. Its settings are:

option view.fov=90.000000deg
option view.vis=6.000000
option view.sat=0.000000
option view.startype=disc
option view.scl=0.800000
option view.clr=0.750000

“Custom star chart” does not toggle display of sky objects or change any colour settings.

Adrian: On mathematical operations

Flesh-eating Dragon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:49:18 +0200

Recently I have been spending some time browsing ScienceBlogs, and there’s one post on which I particularly feel I have something to say. This is the July 25 post on Good Math Bad Math about whether multiplication should be introduced as repeated addition, even though it’s more than that when you start dealing with fractions.

I have a bias. You see, when I was seven years old or thereabouts, having been taught that multiplication is essentially repeated addition, I came up with the idea of exponentiation all by myself. So I say, of course multiplication should be taught as repeated addition, because if it hadn’t been then I wouldn’t have had that creative insight. Later on, when I was taught that other people had already thought of exponentiation, I came up with the idea of “operational algebra”, which was my term for a scheme in which numbers are assigned to operations so that addition is operation #1 and operation #(p+1) with integer operators is repeated operation #p. I had fun playing with this idea. I didn’t make any earth-shattering mathematical discoveries, but who cares? A teenager had fun! Surely that’s significant enough. (In the future, I may tell you more about what I did with this idea, but it was a long time ago and the difficulty is remembering.)

Of course, when you start dealing with fractions, there’s more to multiplication than repeated addition and there’s more to exponentiation than repeated multiplication. But I say, that’s a wonderful opportunity to teach students about the beauty of mathematics, how it’s full of patterns that just seem to fall into place. One and a half to the power of one and a half doesn’t make much sense if you rephrase it as one and a half multiplied by itself one and a half times, and yet, with a bit of very simple bit of algebraic trickery, you can show that it does have a meaning after all, and that meaning is perfectly consistent with the original definition, so that in a manner of speaking you can multiply something by itself one and a half times. It’s all very beautiful - to find that you can define something in terms of integers and have it turn out, unexpectedly, that it can be re-defined in a consistent and simple way to work with all numbers. But appreciating that beauty begins with the definition in terms of integers, so absolutely I say, multiplication should be taught as repeated addition, and exponentiation as repeated multiplication, because those definitions are the foundations of the lookout tower from which the deeper patterns can be seen.

A related post on this blog: “Calculator“.

Sanity (dutch): Leve het activisme!

Michel — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:13:53 +0200

De stroom berichten over Wijnand Duijvendak toont vooral aan hoe ongeïnformeerd de gemiddelde Nederlandse kiezer is, en hoe weinig dat uitmaakt voor het Hebben Van Een Mening. Het zou vooral een schande zijn dat Duijvendak een inbraak heeft gepleegd, en nu lid van de Tweede Kamer is terwijl niemand dat wist.

Maar wacht eens even. Al veel eerder had iedereen kunnen weten dat Duijvendak in bezit is van een strafblad, wegens inbraak. Er was wel enige ophef over, maar lang niet zoveel als nu. Kwestie van komkommer? Ik denk het wel.

Wat mij betreft zijn en blijven (oud-) activisten welkom bij GroenLinks. Op één voorwaarde: het moet geweldloos zijn geweest. De grenzen opzoeken voor je idealen kan, iemand anders wat aandoen niet. Een inbraak als die bij EZ is wat dat betreft een mooi voorbeeld van een geweldloze actie, die bovendien zaken aan het licht bracht waar de minister de kamer onvoldoende over had geïnformeerd.

Er is dus geen enkel probleem voor het functioneren van Wijnand Duijvendak. Ik zou hem hooguit willen verwijten dat het hem niet lukt om GroenLinks goed neer te zetten als de groene partij, tegenover partijen die wel zeggen dat ze milieu belangrijk vinden, maar als het puntje bij paaltje komt hun prioriteiten ergens anders leggen. De reactie van GroenLinks lijkt me dus afdoende. Jammer dat er wat weinig aan damage control is gedaan, waardoor Duijvendak nu als een crimineel wordt afgeschilderd waar menig maffioso bij in het niet valt.

Adrian: Internet news

Flesh-eating Dragon — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:24:48 +0200

I promised some Internet-related updates, but I had some tasks to finish first. Now, on with the updates.

I’ve recently started using Twitter, though not for its intended purpose. Under the name GoldHoarder, I’m using it to record links to the most interesting material I come across online. It has always seemed a bit of a waste to read all sorts of interesting things while surfing the web, and then to promptly forget them because I didn’t make a note, so my Twitter account is a place where I can record the best of what I find online. I’ve been doing this for a while, so if you look you’ll already find links to a variety of items.

What are the criteria for inclusion? Well, including a link is a spontaneous decision, so that depends on my mood. If I’m in a discerning mood, then it will be for knowledge that I particularly want to retain in my long-term memory. If I’m in a less discerning mood, it will be for whatever I found most interesting that day. Also, please note that you can still expect to see website recommendations on this blog from time to time, but those will generally be sites that I’ve had in my bookmarks for some time, and usually several sites at a time that fit a specified theme.

Speaking of sites that I’ve had in my bookmarks for a long time, an example is this fantastic collection of optical illusions. The only reason why I haven’t recommended it before is because I couldn’t find a theme with which to connect it to any other bookmarked sites.

My second piece of news is that I got around to re-watching the Hogfather movie on DVD, and have edited my review of the live broadcast with the benefit of hindsight and repeat viewings.

Thirdly, I have some updates regarding my solitaire game, Elemental. It’s been played over five hundred times now, though the bulk of that consists of myself and a few other regular players. I can tell because for some time the statistics page has been showing a steady rise in the percentage of games won, whereas I would expect that percentage to drop in response to a large influx of first-time players. I’ve been playing it online myself at least half a dozen times a day on average, often over a coffee or between chores.

I’ve had encouraging feedback from several people who’ve had a go, but what I don’t have yet is a critical mass of players to guarantee a sustainable influx of fresh victims. I’d like to have enough people playing each day so that no one individual is responsible for more than a small proportion of all games played, and so that first-time players continue to arrive in a steady trickle. Sincere thanks to Alioth for linking to the game, and also to Podblack.

I bought an advertisement for the game in the local community newspaper, which I don’t think has done me any good but I had to try. Below is a photograph of the advertisement. It features an alternative URL I created with TinyURL for the express purpose of having it fit in a single column (the minimum price for a two-column advertisement is $99). I’m disappointed that they didn’t even give me any bold text, because even the cheaper ads contain an emboldened first word.

Maaike: Ocean

Maaike — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:18:12 +0200

A few Ocean bowls, of various sizes, and one prototype Bug bowl. There are plans for plates, mugs, cream and sugar sets, and whatever else i can think of, but I don't actually have any of that made yet, so you just get to see bowls.

The Ocean bowls are thrown on the wheel, which, since I like to use lots more water than mot when throwing, leaves me with hands covered in slip (watered down clay). While the forms are still on the wheel, I scrape off a good gob or two of the slip, drop it in the middle, and spin the wheel slowly while trailing my finger through the slip, until I get a not-quite-a-spiral pattern that I happen to like. The forms are removed from the wheel, set aside to dry a little, re-attached to the wheel so I can trim a footring into the bottom, set aside to dry all the way, fired, glazed, and re-fired.

The Bug bowls are made with black clay. After trimmimg, I carve bugs[1] into the bowls, fill in the hollows with white clay, scrape off the excess, fire them, glaze them a transparent[2] blue so you can see the colour contrast, and fire them again. The scraping is taking an impossible amount of time, so I think I'm just going to use a squeeze bottle to trail slip in the hollows, thus eliminating scraping for all purposes except touch-ups.

[1] I've tried dragonflies, bees, beetles, a tarantula, and a butterfly. And a few flowers. The dragonflies seem to have the best ratio of annoying fiddly bits to pretty results.

[2] The blue mottling over the dark areas is actually a happy accident. I was wondering vaguely about how to get that effect for another idea entirely[3], but hadn't actually put much research into it, as I already had enough glaze problems to work out. The test tile for that glaze just gave me blue over the white clay and a transparent, glossy nothing over the dark clay. But this bowl was in a firing with someone else's work, whose glazes work best if the kiln reaches optimum temperature, and then stays just below it for a few hours rather than being shut down and cooling immediately. It's called soaking, and it turns out the extra time and heat let little blue crystals form in this glaze, which is where the splashes of colour come from.

[3] The Northern Lights, and how to reproduce them.

Sanity (dutch): De 28e keer

Michel — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:01:14 +0200

6 augustus, een nationale feestdag in huize Klijmij-van der Laan. Alweer een stapje richting de 30. Vroeger vond ik dat heel oud, tegenwoordig zie ik dat ietsje anders. Ik voel me nog steeds een jonge vent van 18

Deze datum is natuurlijk meer bekend door jarigen als Erwin Krol en Robin van Persie, en de atoombom Little Boy op Hiroshima. Op 6 augustus 1980 gebeurde er niet zo heel veel belangrijks, maar er werden wel 2 singles uitgebracht: Start me up van de Rolling Stones en Enola Gay van de band met de geweldige naam Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - in 1998 geremixt door Sash. Terug naar negentienlanggeledentig!

Julia Jones: The Evil Empire wishes you to relive your youth

Julia Jones — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:51:40 +0200

It's also cheap week on DVDs of Oliver Postgate's animation series:
Clangers - Series 1 - Complete -- 3.98
Clangers - The Complete Series 2 -- 4.97
Bagpuss : Complete [1974] 3-97
Ivor The Engine - The Complete Ivor The Engine -- 4.97

Check the prices before ordering, because on these titles they go up and down like a yo-yo. And indeed, did so between me writing this post and going back to check.

Julia Jones: Tuesday Thingers

Julia Jones — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:02:55 +0200

I've missed the last few Tuesday Thinger prompts because I've been so knackered when I get in from work that my brain turns to mush and I don't even remember to check what the prompt is, let alone write a response. But today I've managed something. This week's prompt from bostonbibliophile:

Today's question is only marginally about LibraryThing but I thought it might be a fun question anyway. It's more about blogging. Everyone who participates in Tuesday Thingers has a blog- some have a book blog, some have several, some have blogs that are more personal, etc.- and we've all chosen to participate in this particular way of networking to build traffic, get to know each other, etc. So my question is: what other weekly memes or round robins do you participate in? Is this the only one? Why Tuesday Thingers and not some other weekly Tuesday meme? Or do you do more than one?

This is the only weekly meme I participate in. I'm not that interested in memes in general, but this one grew organically out of an existing social group and conversation that I participate in, and as such tends to cover topics that I find to be an interesting prompt both for writing my own contribution and for reading what others have to say. It's also something that seems to appeal to some of the non-LTER people who read my blog, which is hardly surprising given how many of them are also of the "You will have to pry my books from my cold dead hands" persuasion.

Of course, I started a new job not long after Tuesday Thingers started up, and promptly dropped out of much of my online activities (mostly through lack of energy when I got home rather than lack of time). So I skip Tuesday Thingers more often than not at the moment. But it does say something about how much I enjoy the meme that I will still wander around and read some of the other responses.

Sanity (dutch): The Googling

Michel — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:56:32 +0200

Google kijkt mee in Amsterdam en Rotterdam:

Neuspeuteren op straat – of erger – is niet meer zonder risico. Zonder waarschuwing vooraf heeft Google in Amsterdam en Rotterdam auto’s de weg op gestuurd die gedetailleerde opnamen maken van straat én straatrumoer. De beelden worden gebruikt voor de digitale atlas van het Amerikaanse internetbedrijf.

Oh oh….

Orjan: Back

Orjan — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:01:00 +0200

Back from Amlwch, and Beaumaris.

Fought in a battle with a spear, had a great time, carried a torch down a mountainside, burned a ship, drank cider, had a midnight chinese takeaway, got stung in the throat by wasp, had a great time.

Sleep now.

Edit 00:47 Cats, upset over our absense, despite being fed by neighbour, has shat on our bed cover. Thanks for the welcome home, guys.

sabremeister

Sabremeister — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:00:23 +0200

I've just put the first dozen items from my model railway up on ebay (username "I-am-skint", 'cos I am). 14 down, 50-ish to go.

When I was a teenager, I built up quite a collection, always intending to have a decent layout sometime. However, a lack of money and space always prevented me from achieving this. And now, since I'm really running out of readies, I'm selling it. Nearly a thousand quids-worth when I bought it. Worth about a third as much now. I tried to offload it to the shop where I worked Saturdays in Skipton (where I bought most of it from as well - they've had a change of management since), but they don't have the space to display it. And I was told there's probably nowhere in the area that'll take second-hand - nearest place is Sheffield, apparently. So, ebay it is.

CCA

CCA — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:55:01 +0200

Skirt all taken in, looks lovely :-)

Now I've got a taste for some more of the alterations that have been waiting... Mainly skirts I bought that were too big, and also need taking in

Sanity (dutch): Lowlands 2008: presidentsverkiezingen USA

Michel — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:00:23 +0200

Nog 11 dagen voor Lowlands weer losbarst. En na een afwezigheid van 7 jaar ga ik weer. In 2001 voelde het trouwens toch als een soort “half” aanwezig zijn, omdat ik toen ook voor BNN een reportage maakte en dus af en toe een optreden moest laten schieten om met recorder op pad te gaan. Er is wel het een en ander veranderd sinds toen, zoals de toevoeging van Lowlands University.

De allereerste, op vrijdagmiddag, staat in het teken van de Amerikaanse politiek, met als gast André Krouwel. Hij is ook de man van het Kieskompas. Speciaal voor Lowlands is er een Kieskompas USA, om te zien waar de Lowlands-gangers staan. In navolging van Arnoud Boer heb ik ‘m ook ingevuld, met het onderstaande resultaat. Eigenlijk is Obama vanuit mijn potloodje maar een rechtse conservatieve vent, maar ach, dat nemen we maar voor lief. Zoals ze in de Daily Show zeiden: een charismatische man die in Berlijn enorme mensenmassa’s op een plein toespreekt heeft gewoon wat.

sabremeister: Book III information

Sabremeister — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:39:41 +0200

Another update to the site, this time one of the Goodies.

Julia Jones: X-files boxset going cheap

Julia Jones — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:15:58 +0200

The Evil Empire is selling the X-files DVD boxset cheap this week: The X Files - The Complete Collector's Edition for 70 quid. I'm tempted by that, but I've also got enough DVD boxsets to last me the rest of the year, and I stopped watching somewhere around fifth season, so I shall resist temptation.

ETA: and the bastards just waved *this* at me:
Babylon 5: The Complete Collection + The Lost Tales (Exclusive to Amazon.co.uk)
Complete Babylon 5, *including* "Crusade". For 75 pounds. [whimpers quietly]

CCA

CCA — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:00:46 +0200

Someone at www.nationalrail.co.uk doesn't want people to use trains. That can be the only reason for why, when I type in the train times I want, all I get is 'your journey planning session has been closed due to inactivity'.

The one time I managed to get anywhere, I found that it's impossible to get from Leicester to Birmingham International Station without buggering about with buses on the way. Which, given how close Leicester is to Birmingham, is absolutely ridiculous!

Maaike: Edward

Maaike — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 15:10:36 +0200

Was walking down Duckworth Street this morning and passed a grey cat with gorgeous, deep green eyes sitting on the steps at India Gate. Said hello. Walked a little further, and saw a "Lost" poster in the window of the Heritage Shop with a cat that looked identical. (His name, apparently, is Edward.) Called both numbers; left messages on both answering machines. Really, really, *really* wish I had a bigger-on-the-inside pocket to carry cat cages and tins of food for such occasions. I'm going to be worried about the poor guy all day now... I'm going to have to call again this evening to see if his people were able to find him.

CCA

CCA — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:54:12 +0200

I've now filled in the answers for the 'Friends Meme'.

Today, I will be mostly taking in my recently-bought Monsoon skirt, which already looks lovely just pinned up :-)

Aquarion: Science in rap form

Aquarion — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:48:40 +0200

This is a rap about particle physics and CERN's Large Hadron Collider and what it's for.

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

Julia Jones: Do I want a Cybook Gen 3?

Julia Jones — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:46:23 +0200

I'm seriously thinking about buying an ebook reader, a concept which is probably causing various people to fall off their chairs they are laughing so hard. Because I don't do ebooks. Not only do I not do ebooks, there is an entire fanfic zine series which exists in large part because I don't like reading anything more than a couple of screens' worth on a screen, and felt that if I was going to format a good piece of fanfic and print it out, I might as well make it available to others who felt the same way.

Now, it has caused a certain amount of amusement and bemusement over the last couple of years that I, an epublished author with some modicum of success in ebooks, do not read ebooks myself. The trouble is that a particular combination of medical issues means that I find ebooks significantly harder to read than dead tree books. One of those problems is the RSI, which makes pushing a button to turn a page rather more painful than turning a physical paper page. That's before we factor in more page turns for the same word count on any screen that's small and light enough to routinely carry around with me.

Add in how little reading I've been doing the last few years, and dropping the price of half a dozen hardbacks (at a bare minimum) on a fragile piece of electronics I will undoubtedly sit on or drop in the bath seems unappealing even if I didn't have physical discomfort problems with ebooks.

And yet... I like the *concept* of ebooks. I have a couple of Project Gutenberg pieces loaded on my geriatric Palm IIIxe, for "stuck at the bus stop" occasions, and would have more if I could obtain the circular tuit necessary to remember how to use Plucker and load up some more. So I've been thinking on and off about getting something, most likely a Palm TX as that will give me the PDA functions I do make some use of, plus give me a major screen and memory upgrade over my IIIxe, plus add wifi capability. These are probably worth the money for me, especially as it's a genuine tax-deductible business purchase.

Only now a friend has offered me her Cybook Gen 3 for a hundred quid, because it Does Not Play Well with her Mac and she wants to switch to a Sony. I have time to think about this, because she won't want to get rid of it until September, when the new Sony unit ships.

I'm tempted, at that price. I'm *very* tempted. I'll definitely want to play with it for a bit to see if it suits me (I'm concerned about the epaper reverse-polarity flash on page-turn, for starters), but the widget seems to offer a reasonable compromise between big enough screen to be usable and size/weight issues. As far as I know it can also play MP3s, which would be useful. And it has the long battery life that the TX doesn't have (a major reason why I don't already have a TX).

Anyone want to give reasons why I should/shouldn't go for this?

Julia Jones: July book log

Julia Jones — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:33:54 +0200

My book log for July is thin, in spite of my best intentions.

Reginald Hill -- Blood Sympathy, which I didn't review because I couldn't quite get into it.

Masara Minase -- Lies and Kisses
Yaoi manga, which I read on Monday but haven't had the energy to review yet. Enjoyed this -- lovely art and I liked the characters.
http://www.librarything.com/work/698499

P D James -- Cover Her Face
The first Adam Dalgliesh book. Current lunchtime reading. Only part way through, and finding myself disinclined to finish it. I've always liked it on previous reads, but it is I think my least favourite of the Dalgliesh books, in part because it *is* the first, and the character is not so well developed as he was later on in the series. I'd probably do better with it if I were reading it straight through rather than a small section each day.
http://www.librarything.com/work/14341/

You'd think I'd be reading more, since I'm now spending at least an hour a day on the bus in the course of getting to and from my place of wage slavery, but I tend to get sick if I try to read on the bus. I have scribbled odd notes for stories on my Palm, which is less of a problem because my scribbling notes tends to involve long bouts of staring out of the window, but even that is something that can lead to feeling queasy after a while. Nevertheless, I'm contemplating joining the modern world and getting an ebook reader, of which more in a later post. I might be able to manage short stories downloaded from places like Strange Horizons.

I also found myself on the mailing list of two publicity agents looking for book bloggers to review their clients' books. The first one sent me a personalised email that made it clear up front that he wanted to offer me a free review copy, and that he had reason to think it might match my reading tastes (he was in fact off-target in this, but it was a reasonable assumption for him to make). He got a personalised reply explaining that I'm not interested in review copies right now because with the new day job I'm not in a fit state to give a review copy proper attention. He'd probably found me in the first place by putting appropriate keywords into Google, and mailmerged the book bloggers that turned up, but it was clearly a mailshot targeted at bloggers who might be interested in reviewing that specific book. If I was still getting through a book every day or two, I'd have been interested in getting the review copy even though it's outside my usual interest range.

The second one... Well, suffice it to say that I had reported it as spam before I realised that it was an offer of a review copy. That's because it *was* spam, being a mass mailshot of a press release for a book, with a small item way down at the bottom saying that review copies of this book were available on request. Since it was presumably offering me a free copy of a book, rather than just trying to get me to buy one, I used the unsubscribe link on the next offer instead of following my usual "nuke from orbit" policy. But really, expecting people to read a long ad for the book before mentioning that this is in order to offer them a review copy is likely to prove counterproductive when dealing with bloggers.

I did wonder if my name had been added to a list of book bloggers to spam, but there have been no further unsolicited offers of review copies, so perhaps not. All very odd.

(I should note for anyone who's thinking of offering me a review copy of something that a) the answer is likely to be "thanks but no", for reasons well illustrated by the first part of the post; b) I live in the UK, so there may be a postage issue for non-UK books.)

Sanity (dutch): Weekend Deze Nog (60)

Michel — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:01:50 +0200

Vandaag in het nieuws: het is bedroevend gesteld met het rekenonderwijs. De grote boosdoener zou het Realistisch Rekenen zijn. De staartdeling verdwijnt, en in plaats daarvan komen verhalende sommetjes. Het doel was juist om leerlingen beter te laten begrijpen wat ze doen. Blijkbaar werkt dat niet. Overigens merk ik ook nog niet zoveel van enorm cijferinzicht bij alle leerlingen: er zijn er die bij schaal-sommetjes gerust honderdduizenden kilometers invullen voor een afstand Amsterdam-London. Zonder denken overgeschreven van de rekenmachine. Nee, doe mij maar die goede oude staartdeling, dan komt je altijd goed uit!

Beth: Romeo es Julia: clips

Beth — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:19:46 +0200

And as a follow-up to yesterday's post: Rómeó és Júlia in sound and motion.

(Read more ...)

Kimberley: Downstairs

Kimberley — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:37:58 +0200

Downstairs' door was fixed yesterday as it had become distinctly worse for the wear due to repeated police attention. The most recent damage was inflicted a few months ago, after which the inhabitant presumably found other accommodation because his music stopped shaking up my walls.

I wondered if he was going to return, but another neighbour said they'd spotted a new tenant. So I went to bed happy in the knowledge that there would be no more abrupt wake ups caused by midnight raids.

Then at 3am came a sudden loud roar of "STOP! POLICE!". My heart did its best to obey.

I cautiously peered out the window to observe an infestation of police half a street down at the crossroads. No idea what was going on, but there was a blue light disco in our bedroom for the next half hour. Also, shouting, sirens and general excitement.

Wingnut slept through it all.

Julia Jones: BT's dunning tactics

Julia Jones — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:51:40 +0200

I received today a threatening letter from BT, saying that my payment is now overdue and threatening me with late payment and/or re-connection charges if I do not pay it within the next couple of days. And making heavy hints about why don't I switch to direct debit and let them have direct access to my bank account so that this need never happen again.

The date on this threat letter is 27th July.

The due date of the bill is 28th July (and the bill in question was paid on the 25th by direct transfer through BillPay).

So they are sending out "overdue payment" threats a) before the bill is actually overdue, and b) after the bill has already been paid, and enough time after said payment that they should know that the bill has already been paid, given that it's all fully automated. I am somewhat curious as to whether this is actually legal, and if there is a lawsuit in progress on the subject.