Hungover

Inexplicably hungover from half a glass of red wine, today was a struggle for me. Even after cramming fried food into my mouth at The Flying Pan in Wan Chai, and then looking for the World's Perfect Laptop Bag, I felt like death.

Something new, something old

Today, I'm finally going to upload the Automatic Comedian that I've been working on since the middle of last year. I would have done it sooner, but I've had problems with understanding simple things like DNS and FTP and JFDS*. Then I'm going to send it to its inspiration, and hope that he likes it and doesn't tell me to obliterate it from the internet forever. Fingers crossed now...

Secondly, I'm starting a new project. Every day I'm going to photograph a different cliche, and try to publish them on Flickr. As I've a few days coming up where I'm going to be out of the country and in hotel rooms barren of wi-fi, or at weddings (where I understand it's de rigeur not to spend the event shouting obscenities at a wilfully unhelpful image processing program), I might not actually get to upload something every day, but I'm hoping that over the course of the next 49 days, I'll average one cliche per day.

Here's the first one:

If you want more, follow this link (as at today it's only got one photograph, but every day that should swell).

If you want even more, I suggest you read the Dictionary of Cliches, which is where I'm selecting my delicious, fresh cliches from.

* Just flipping well do something!

Trains and booze

I'm cold and tired, after another day of training. Some of it is physically tiring (having a big lad try to pull your hands off your arms always is), some of it is fatiguing to my self-esteem (being corrected by a youngster when we don't have a language in common is, it turns out, harder than when you aren't struggling for comprehension). I've also had a chance to get really bored by a powerpoint presentation.

Why The British Had An Empire

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British floated around the world, taking control of land by force of arms. It's not much of a sop to point out that everyone else was at it, and possibly only a small consolation that we weren't the Belgians. In each case I like to think we invaded with the best of intentions.

Looking for the right word

I don't recall exactly why or how, but my girlfriend has engineered a situation wherein she's expected to teach the children at her kindergarten all about vegetables.

(She's a teacher, dammit, before anyone starts questioning why I'm in a relationship with somebody at a kindergarten.)

Mic-Macs and language

I watched Mic-Macs this evening, which I'd somehow construed as a French time-travel comedy (clearly part of my mind believes every French film = Les Visiteurs) but which turned out to be rather surprising. A bit twee in parts, and with that certain greenish tint that Jeunet loves so much, but it was fun for an hour and three-quarters. It all wraps up quite tidily, which was all I needed from a Wednesday evening.

Working on a phrase gang

After work today I came home and carried on slogging through my auto-gibberish generator.  It's been ages (well, 2 months since I started working on this) - partly because I've been rather lacksidaisical at working on it, what with everything else going on, and partly because it's harder than it looked initially.

Teaching a computer to talk

Regenerating plausible text isn't as easy as it might look. Here's a first attempt, using uncurated phrases and a random number generator.

One of the great things about this job is my work a bit of a work I am trying to life day I am going to before would otherwise not have you. That much, at least, is obvious.

Not very impressive, eh? So I cleaned up a few terms, and tried again:

It occurred to me yesterday that ifmy in the middle ofwork to be in thework don't always realise they have to listen to melife I am going today the rest of thebefore the rest of the you.

Not there yet. I fiddled slightly more, and now:

It occurred to me yesterday that ifmy I don't know ifwork belief is that it would have been really work the old man wholife the end of theday 0before the rest of the you. 0

Now comes the tiresome side of things: going back and looking at all the phrases I've got, and making sure I tie them together tidily, without accidentally falling foul of garden-path sentences. Here's the fruit of another hour's labour:

I'm not mentally ill. And even if I was, would this seem so strange: my pay from writing two series of that sitcom means not having to worry about if I am going to work , which makes sense, until you realise that's just the plot of last night's episode of 'The Simpsons'. Which makes me think that the first . It wouldn't be so bad if my girlfriend and and a couple of my I was going to man a bit of a show I didn't want to man . Thanks for paying attention.

Well, getting closer...

Playing with language - the technical gubbins

I'm really enjoying using the command line today to do things.  I spend most of my time at work using Windows to do things, and for most spreadsheet work that's ok (I don't want to draw a graph from the command line, thanks very much) but if you want to do something iteratively, often a point and click interface isn't the best way, once your desired workflow is a bit different to what the program thinks it should be.  Plus, Linux comes with lots more free tools that are easily accessible, once you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirtier.  If mucking around with scripts isn't your thing, don't read any further.

Playing with language

Today I was looking at Get TEDPad, where a chap has run some statistical analysis against transcripts of the first five hundred or so TED lectures, and figured out how to generate snippets of new, non-existent TED speeches that sound either convincing and good quality English, or (when he switches it to the dark side) good quality English spoken by an idiot obsessed by whatever the New York Times tells him is important at this particular moment in time.

Trapped!!

After laughing at my intrepid removal men on Tuesday for being trapped in the lift, poetic justice caught up with me. Last night I got home to find the lift had broken down, so I had to walk 172 steps up to the front door of the apartment.  There had been two men working on the (intimidatingly old and worn-out looking) lift until late in the evening, so I assumed it would be working when I got in this morning.

Down the lift shuddered, to the first floor.  The doors came open, and I skipped down the stairs.  Only to see rain spraying in the back door, so I turned, and got right back in the lift, pressing the button to ascend.

Up in the air

Clooney never had to deal with this.

The enormous plume of ash continues to spew across Europe, as those wily Icelanders wreak havoc on the hated bankers of Europe/flee in terror from their exploding glacier.

Make it count

Apparently Cantonese is one of the fastest languages for counting in, because all of the numbers are single syllables. One of my co-workers passed me this information, gleaned from Malcolm Gladwell, "or somebody like that".   Shame that English never adopted this approach, or I could count faster. I figure in a race to the number six, there's not much in it.