A year of eating differently

I work in Soho Square, so I'm surrounded by sandwich bars, restaurants, pubs, dirty cafes, felafel specialists, the lot. I've been working here for almost a year now, so I've sampled quite a few places, got stuck in a rut quite a lot too. What I'm going to attempt to do is not lunch at the same place twice over the next 12 months.
There are a few ground rules to establish near the start:

• You have to be back at your desk an hour after you left - no sneaking off to Mayfair in search of variety


• Starbucks on Soho Street is not Starbucks on Wardour Street - it's the establishment, not the brand. I think this is fair, if only because the croissants at the Pret A Manger on Frith Street are never as warm and flaky as the croissants at the Pret A Manger opposite Soho Street; there is variation even in these brands


• I can do what I like for breakfast and dinner. Otherwise, I could seriously handicap my going-out activities, and I need a certain number of bagels with marmite to get me through a year


• Work meals don't count - so if they keep ordering in from Make Mine and I'm forced to have that in a lunch meeting rather than skip out, then the exercise isn't invalidated. Or if I keep getting dragged to Claridge's - well, it's not my fault, ok?


• I can buy food from the Tesco's on Dean Street, the Sainsbury's on Charing Cross Road, or any other supermarket I like, but not the same meal more than once in a year. That way, if I find all these restaurants demolish my wallet, I can at least find some succour in cheap food


• Home produced food is probably cheating. Haven't figured this out yet, but I trust that my disorganisation every evening and morning should mean we don't run into a problem here for a few weeks...

I'm already two lunches into it: one pizza and one Korean. Will write up a meal every day from now on, until the 22nd of August 2008. Here's hoping we don't decide to move the office to Winnersh Triangle in the meantime.
And if you're interested, you can see where I've been on this handy map:

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You wasters

Sometime perhaps I should compile a list of things that annoy me - but I have a feeling that would annoy me rather a lot:

• It would remind me of things that annoy me


• It would be a demonstration of anal retentiveness


• It would be yet another list


• ...


• Profit?

However, in the meantime it's still somewhat enraging that when you pop into Tescos on Dean Street, it's so icy cold that they've put an electric space heater in by the tills. What is the point in refrigerating the entire store so heavily that the staff have to warm themselves up to avoid frostbite while sat at the tills? OK, you could get them all warmer clothes, but wouldn't it be simpler just to turn the air con down a bit? Guys? Guys?

Very sleepy...

Tired and emotional, what what what? I can say no more.

Rough, very rough

 

And this is before I found myself laid low by some dodgy food. Ah, Marrakech, I love you, but you've hurt me so.

Sometimes it just annoys me...

 

...How is it that we can get things that little bit wrong, while other people get them right? I've already gone on about roadsigns, but pause for a moment and compare and contrast a ticket for the express train from Stockholm's Arlanda airport to the city centre, with the equivalent from London Heathrow:

 

One has a nice body of colour, text printed in a proper typeface, and the other looks to have been run off on your dad's old dot-matrix computer from some time in the early Eighties. Well, at least we know Alan Sugar's old hardware has still got some use somewhere. It just feels a little unfair that if the Swedes can get that right, that we pay a bit more in the UK for something that's manifestly not as good.

Swedish tautology

 

I rather like this sign, although I'm not sure if it points to a certain fatalism on the part of the proprietor...

More Scandinavian road signs

 

Contrast this with the Norwegian version - still better than the UK one, I think. Although upon mentioning this to my dear friend Katarina, her response was that the Norwegian man is wearing a hat because they're more uptight than the Swedes and are uncomfortable about venturing out with a naked head. Can it really be down to the emotional [im]maturity of a nation affecting its iconography so deeply? And doesn't that say something bad about us Brits and our huge headed, triangular footed and clenched fisted (unpleasant adjective, but bear with me, please) road walker?

Web 2.0 - what is it, exactly?

4 words: More monkeys, less typewriters.
OK, so now the monkeys are sharing typewriters, but does that mean you'll see a complete rendition of War & Peace any time sooner?

A good reason to fly Aeroflot

Then there was the ear-splitting cabin music, featuring "scraps of lyrics underlining the bravado of flying Aeroflot: You should embrace even the moment of death, and The deadly fire is waiting for you". (from here)
I'm game for any airline that plays this kind of thing while you're flying; makes a change from the dull hum of the engines, anyway.

A kitten! Ah!

 
OK, that's the last photo I upload tonight. Hello Frankie, hello world...

Another road sign

 

From Piolenc, north of Avignon. Still not sure why even the road signs are prettier in France. Is it to do with being on holiday?

The sky in Orange

 

Finished again

 
OK, so that was MSM 2007: 3 hours, 31 minutes and 13 seconds of official pain, plus a bit more besides. But I do look quite the movie star, right? At least, if the movie involved somebody who was really knackered and could do with a shave...

The further politeness of Norwegians

 

And if a chap who wouldn't dream of getting dressed before crossing the road wasn't enough, how about this workman, who has also been good enough to put on shoes and a cap, and, unlike the English lets-see-how-badly-we-can-fold-up-this-umbrella pose, actually is doing something of use, vis a vis moving rubble from one pile to another. And to think they send us a Christmas tree every year...

The politeness of Norwegians

 

Look at this zebra crossing sign carefully. Note if you will that the representative chap who is crossing the road has bothered to put on a proper pair of shoes, trousers and even a hat. This puts the uncouth english roadsigns to shame...

More Antipodean films

Hunting for a DVD release date for Eagle vs Shark, stumbled across Black Sheep instead. It's like Brain Dead - with sheep!

Let's go to the seaside

So if you live in north-west London, say, and you're not from Britain, and you want to go to the beach. Here's some recommendations (I guess they'd also work if you flew into London and stayed in a hotel if you had a car):
In Kent: you’ve got Dover (which is a bit of a dump – there’s the white cliffs and the castle, but the town itself is quite shabby, and don’t go anywhere near the ‘White Cliffs Experience’ which is a tourist attraction where you don’t get to see either the cliffs or the castle, and is thus a bit pointless).
Just down the coast from Dover is Folkestone. This is also a dump. Avoid.
But next to Folkestone is Hythe and Sandgate – which are nice small seaside towns; there’s the Royal Military Canal in Hythe which is really nice to walk alongside (as historical trivia goes, it was built in the 1800s to prevent a French invasion – which is baffling, because you figure if the French could cross the Channel, it wouldn’t be hard to get across another 10 metres of water).
Hythe has very good fish restaurants, a good promenade, that kind of thing, although it’s not as grand as Brighton – no pier, for example.
However, to get to any of these you have to get the M20, which is all the way over the other side of London for you. There’s also Whitstable (which is north Kent, nearish to Canterbury – so a bit closer to London, but it’s on the M2, which is not always as good a road as the M20 – oh, and one other bother is that every so often the M20 gets shut (usually due to a strike at the docks in Calais or similar)
Might therefore be better to head towards Poole, which is near Southampton (so take the M3) or I guess there’s also the Isle of Wight – but that’s more somewhere to go for a weekend rather than just the day.
Further away, Devon / Dorset / Cornwall all have great beaches, but that’s a bit further to go. If you wanted to go further afield, Dumfries (south west Scotland) is worth a visit – really unspoilt countryside, but that’s about a 6 hour drive, and as it’s further north the weather may be less reliable)

Singlespeed competitions and music

Ah, just back from Avignon for the European singlespeed champs - came last, which is a triumph of sorts, right?
 

Supplies for the ride down Ventoux
Anyway, one of the great side effects of going to singlespeed championships is hearing foreign music that you probably wouldn't have encountered otherwise - last year in Sweden I was sat in a cafe on the top of the Vanity (a hill in Stockholm) and was introduced to Sophie Zelmani, and in France this weekend, heard the slightly melancholy tones of Axelle Red.
Otherwise, still trying to get some of Raymond och Maria's Swedish music in the UK - it's harder than it sounds, which is gutting, as I love the English versions, but I've a feeling the original Swedish ones must be even better...

Eating out in London

OK, so I've been working in Soho Square for almost 8 months now, and I've had Thai, burgers, pizza, more burgers, sandwiches upon sandwiches, salad, yada yada yada. And now I'm bored. But I'm wondering if this is a garlicky step too far: Garlic & Shots; I mean, hey, I like garlic, and I like shots of vodka. And I couldn't care less about the stench it will provide the people in my office when I roll back in after lunch. But there's not much for a vegetarian to eat there, and I can't do it on a Tuesday or a Thursday, because that's shorinji kempo night and the one thing I learnt a few years ago is that it's disgusting to sweat hard when the perspiration pumping through your pores is laced with garlic. So will investigate at the end of this week...

Movies

I really want to see Eagle vs Shark (should have linked that, but I'm lazy and you've all got IMDB after all...) From the trailer, looks like a note-perfect nerd-meets-nerd-and-falls-in-love type film. In New Zealand. Some have compared it to Napoleon Dynamite, but I don't think you're meant to just be cackling at the idiocy of the characters, whereas there is a certain cruelty to the depiction of the ginger afro'd dancer. But enough. It's a NZ film, so it's doubtful it will ever turn up in the UK, apart from at 3am on a Wednesday night on Channel 4. Off to DVDOrchard in 6 months then. We might not have Casablanca, but we'll always have multiregion players...

Two down, seven to go

Shedding lives like a cat on the way to work today. Almost got taken out by a cement lorry coming the other way as I rode down through Dulwich, and then on the way to Kennington spent a bit too long eying up some passing lady's breasts, and almost went over the bonnet of a car turning across the bus lane. Whoops. Still, got to work alive. On the way over Waterloo Bridge, some guy on a Specialized road bike went past me, so I hauled after him and overtook him by the end of the bridge. Possibly enraged by somebody on a cheaper machine beating him, he charged off through Covent Garden and almost put another bloke into an oncoming bus. Who then followed him, rather enraged. I wobbled along behind, waiting to see if he could catch him up, which he did only at Short's Gardens; bit of a row between the two of them, but no fisticuffs (shame). Isn't cycling grand?

Sunday, painful Sunday

Went to Gorrick race today. Did 3 laps. Should have done 4. Came last. That is all.

An ethical dilemma

It was very cold today, very cold indeed. At least a centimetre of snow fell, so of course all the trains went on the blink, and I had to walk from Cannon St to the office. On the way through Denmark Street, a homeless guy asked me for change and I said I didn't have any; as it turns out I did, so that went on a bagel for breakfast, for me. So much for middle class guilt.
But since I'm working on philanthropy for my MA dissertation, the following occurred to me:
a) I don't like being asked for money on the street
b) If I give money to tramps, they'll spend it on booze
c) Giving money to tramps will hasten their demise
Thus (d) follows: give money to tramps, they'll drink themselves to death, and you can proceed to work unbothered. And since we might cruelly assume they'll never lift themselves back from the pit they're in, it's hardly a utilitarian cost to bring about their deaths, and as it's what they want, you'll be respecting their autonomy, so Kantians shouldn't get cross at you either.
A rather weak argument, on several grounds. (b) isn't necessarily true, and even if it were, it would take a long time for (c) to reach its fruition, while meanwhile you'd keep getting solicited for donations, which was hardly the avowed point of the exercise. Plus you may not be respecting the autonomy of somebody if you give into a desire they have whilst deranged by cold and booze, and who's to say that once a vagrant, always a vagrant with no more hope.
So I don't think that's a good guide to life, or anything to add to my dissertation. Otherwise, would probably graduate to kicking people to death, or similar.

In the bleak midwinter...

Well, at least in Tromso it wasn't actually snowing, and there wasn't that stupid Crystal Palace hill in the way. Struggled to run in today - very cold, and the onset of snow as I ran through Anerley, although somewhat amusing, can't have helped. Nor can going out for a beer with a lady of the internet last night, particularly as she went to the wrong pub to begin with, leaving me stuck on my own with a beer. (The whole not drinking thing really had the kibosh put on it on the 21st, when I went to the Oval with Jason and had 4 pints, then felt deathly all of Sunday).
Anyway, 17.36 km in 1:26 and a bit; slower than last week, but I put that down to not eating properly. Raced a bloke from Kennington up to Waterloo but he took a lot out of me by choosing the right route across busy intersections, whilst I waited for traffic to stop and lost ground. Boo.
On the other hand, have a new jacket. And it's very shiny, too. Slightly more comfortable than my Race Face top, which was beginning to be composed more of dried perspiration than polyester. Yum.

Painful running

Yikes. Ran 10 miles today and boy did it hurt. I've got a cramped up muscle in my left shin, which I'm a bit worried about, so I think it might be a day or two before I get any more use out of it. Although there's tennis and kempo tomorrow, so that needs a bit of a rethink. Blast...

100 Mile Diet

A nice idea, but part of me thinks that it must be a lot easier in a habitat like Vancouver, rather than in the urbanised south-east of England. Then again, 100 miles is quite a big range...
100 Mile Diet

Commuting to work on foot

First an admission. I'm a bit guilty that this is the first time I've worn these trainers in anger, having bought them back in October 2006, or maybe even earlier. But look at them: they're just too shiny to take away from their box.
Anyway, happy to say that Gel-Kayano XII's are as comfy as any other Asics, and don't require breaking in. Put them on at 6:45 today and then ran 17 km to work, without a single spot of bother. Motion Based here. From Advanced Marathoning, "the most beneficial intensity range for your long runs is 10 to 20 percent slower than your goal marathon race pace"; overall, I was hitting 5 minutes per km; to get to 3 hours I will need to run at 4:16 or below. That means training between 4:42 and 5:07; out of the 17 k on this run, 3 were too slow, and 2 (the last two) were too fast. So I'm feeling slightly more confident about being able to knock half an hour out of my PB. Let's see what happens, eh?
And for the first time in a while, felt perky after commuting in: possibly it's the extra adrenaline produced through all the pain of pounding the pavement. I prefer to hope that it's to do with 125g of Torq recovery powder immediately after reaching the office, rather than the usual flopping into the shower and not bothering to get to the coffee shop until 10am.

Stockholm's new advertising campaign

Now normally I despise viral marketing, but there's something about Stockholm's new tourism campaign that's just too happy to resist. Is it the singing Swedes? The dancing meatballs? The dancing glitterball that's shaped like a glitterball? The race HQ from the '06 Singlespeed World Champs appearing in the background? The clever approach to personalisation, where they just rerecorded the song with the most popular 50 names they could think of in it? Whatever, it's all good.

Rule of the week

POSEUR: see FRENCH WORDS

More singlespeed racing

You can stick riding around some cold Scottish mountains up your arse: I'm going to the European Singlespeed Champs in France to eat foie gras, drink champagne and crash my bike through a hedge. A beautifully groomed hedge, not some heap of thistles maintained by a ginger alcoholic who can't afford underwear to go under his skirt.

More racing

Went to Thetford today to race my bike. Motion Based record here.
I don't think I've raced a bike of any sort for at least 18 months - maybe a Beastway in 2005, and before that mostly DH for a few years with the occasional tandem misadventure rolled in. But it was really nice to go back to it. I think the marathon training must help, in that I'm a lot more accepting of pain than I used to be, and I don't back off the effort when it starts to hurt. But the other surprise for me was that I can ride singletrack quite a bit better than a lot of people in races - all the people on gears would leave me standing on the fireroads, but I'd get all that back when we got to twisty bits. And I got a cheer for making singlespeed noises on the way up one of the steep bankings on the course :)
So apart from having to be up at 7.30 in the morning to drive 100 miles, all positive. I've raced 3 times in the first 14 days of 2007, which is also something to feel kind of proud of. And I've bought a whole load of food from Torq fitness, to see if that's anything better than the SIS stuff I know and love. (Apart from anything else, they have pineapple & ginger flavour energy bars - what's not to like? Hoping for a chocolate and chilli flavour soon...)

Proof of the existence of humour?

 
Well, I don't mean the frankly bonkers statue in the foreground. What you should be able to make out behind it is the Cathedral of St John The Divine [unfinished], which they've been working at for over a hundred years now, one way or the other. And it's not done yet.
That alone isn't the sense of humour. I think where the proof comes in is that back in 2001, for a bit of light relief one transept burnt down, and now as well as trying to finish the building, they've got to clean all the soot off the inside too.
Would it be unwise to suggest there might be a message here, that somebody somewhere had enough cathedrals and fancied a hospital, or a really big Xbox, for a change? I wouldn't say so myself, just in case I got burned at the stake, but eh? Eh eh? 

Another marathon running photo

Ah, the joy of cameras that still use film. Here's a blast from the past, recently introduced to the digital world - me, half way through the Vancouver marathon:

V & A

Tromso Polar Night Half Marathon

Back from Tromso for a day now, and almost ready to go back out there again. 01:41:45 got me to 11th in my age class, but I reckon if I don't do anything stupid next year (like drink at Christmas, or get knocked off my bike, or run a 10k PB in the same week, or omit to buy a pair of Asic Gel Arctics) then I should be able to hit 01:30:00. There, I've said it. That can be a first resolution for 2008...

Near the start, the night before
Anyway, the race was beautiful. Precious little ice, but snow all the way round. The route is almost the same as the second half of the summer marathon, but with a few extra hills thrown in near the start and end, to keep you a bit further away from the road. And from the Mackol brewery, perhaps. The whole thing is even quieter and more peaceful - you're just out there, running along between little tin lids of paraffin, wondering why you're doing this and trying not to throw up.
Ah yes, the joy of almost vomitting. Almost chucked up at about 6k; think I overdid it on the pasta at lunchtime. Didn't overdo it on the clothes front: two base layers, two coats, gloves, hat, thick tights, thick socks, waterproof shoes - just about right. Never toasty, never hot.
And not much else to say apart from that. The last bit before the town is really dark - up through a hard little hill to finish you off - but in the darkness it's just so beautiful you don't really mind. More like Christmas than anything else, and when you run past the church and the rest of Tromso's chocolate box Storgatan, it's enough to make you forget the pain.
Plus the awards ceremony was held in the pub opposite the brewery. How great is that?


Nick, waiting for the bus for next year

Another database book

This looks promising, from the title page alone. One of the lonely few data warehouse developers that I know is off to buy it at lunchtime (good luck finding that in the mall) and then we'll get some proper feedback.

Ducks

Every year, I get another duck for my birthday. Is there a message for me somewhere?

Top 10 Planning Points

Going through all my old stuff as part of the New Year clean-out, found some very old advice from a tax accountant. At least ten years on, some of it is certain to be out of date (China was third in the list of Top Ten Shit Places to go for Tax Reasons as I'm kind of assuming they're more liberal now), but I think the ten planning points still stand:
1. Don't put your hand down the toilet on a plane.
2. Don't take chocolate from an Italian.
3. Never pass up on the opportunity to take a piss.
4. Avoid hanging out with Journalists in Somalia.
5. Don't have sex in Kenya
6. When people laugh at your jokes check your flies
7. Never fuck with Samoan Rugby players
8. Stronzo doesn't mean beautiful in Italian.
9. Arabs drive in the middle of the road
10.Don't try getting off with Snow White at Disney World.
(Myself, I've only profited from point 8, which I learnt when impressionable and even now can use as a useful interjection with my Italian chums. Well, chum.)

10k again...

Entered the Serpentine 10k on New Year's Day and rather overcooked it - put in around 20:30 for the first 5k, and was already deflating by that point. I was flagging badly for the second half - partly down to wearing too much kit. Just goes to show one shouldn't always believe the tabloid reports that we're ALL GOING TO DIE in a huge storm at the start of 2007. Anyway, got 43:05, which beats this by a good 29 seconds.
At the time, thought I hadn't got close to my PB, because I thought it was 50 seconds faster, but this was ameliorated by meeting the lovely Claire, who had been kind enough to buy me a helium-filled dinosaur balloon, and, coincidentally enough, went to see Half Man Half Biscuit just before Christmas.

We went to the RA, had a bowl of soup, watched the New Year's Parade. I seem to like marching bands more than I anticipated. Possibly that's a bad thing, but who knows?
Oh, and had an evil scheme concocted over the festive break. I'm going to put some money in trust for my godson, but he only gets it once he's old enough if he can eat 5 lbs of cheese in a single sitting. (And only after that, will it be revealed that the Cushtie Fortune can only be spent upon more cheese) Pros? Cons?

Resolutions for 2007

1. No coffee for a month
2. No booze for a month
3. Take a photo every day
4. Finish your MA with a distinction
5. Get your 1st kyu in shorinji kempo
6. Beat your previous time in Tromso in June - let's see if we can make 3.00...
7. GET A GIRLFRIEND
8. Stay happy
9. Get rid of things you don't need
10. Learn one new rule from the Oxford Dictionary of Modern English Usage every week

Another thing to save up for

A decent suit.
Luckily, he's not taking on new customers at the moment. So maybe by the end of next year I'll have saved up enough for a new suit. One that will be at least 10 times as much as I paid for the last one... Perhaps I am concussed.

Merry Christmas

Here's a kind of festive image from my recalcitrant Pentax (the most curmudgeonly camera I've ever had to use). Ben and I in Crystal Palace, in a pub.

Bad Toby did a bad thing

You can't see it too well here, but went for a ride with young Toby on the singlespeeds today. This was the first outing for the Love/Hate, and apart from those frankly awful Panaracer Trailblasters on wet mud and leaf mulch, everything went swimmingly. Until, for no apparent reason, Toby decided to reach over and try to adjust the lock out setting on my forks. That's my forks, if you weren't paying attention there.
I go "hang on", and the next thing you know we've clashed front wheels and both go sailing over the bars. I've got a load of bruises, a suspicious right wrist, and a wheel that was so buckled I felt no compunction at all in guilting the Toby into truing it. But hey, hopefully nowt broken, and it gives you a good anecdote for the pub.
So, on the new bike so far, the scores are:
28 km ridden
1 crash
Prize to the first person to figure out from the GPS data exactly how fast we were going when we stopped...

Why didn't I buy a MacBook Pro?

OK, it's just embarrassing to discover that you can't touch type as well as you thought you could, because doing this in the dark at 1am requires a bit more attention than I first thought. Hey ho.
Anyway, apart from issues with the A key, not doing too bad. Went to see The Prestige tonight - thought it was great, although the ending is obvious a mile away, as some of the critics had complained. Still a very powerful, funny, and occasionally shocking film - and I don't just mean David Bowie. Also: Christmas shopped, had successful interviews for my next job, bought tickets for the Nutcracker for Christmas Eve. All in all a rather successful night.
And since I've got Bluetooth working, here's a picture to show that occasionally camera phones can get it right:

Drunken emails

Can be a good thing. Got home last night (well, this morning) and drunkenly emailed various women across dating websites. (I was going to say every woman I came across, but I figured there would be needlessly crude rejoinders to that). And got two positive replies, which is shocking.

Hooray for the Christmas Goat

Web cam here.
For those of you that haven't heard, every year the good people of Gavle in Sweden build a goat out of hay bales, to celebrate Christmas. I know that few of the words in that sentence make sense once conjoined together, but hey ho. Most years, the goat is destroyed in one catastrophe or another. (Here's the list - best read in a mournful Swedish accent. My favourite is probably 1987, although the year I was born was kind of amusing too.)
But this year, the goat may yet survive: "This year we celebrate his 40th birthday and the best present we could give him is to keep him alive." Let's hope so...

Trying to find a good picture to impress women with

 
Here's part of the project to take a picture every day for a year: me, looking smug or simple, in a hat 

Booze, drugs, Nazis, etc

The ever wonderful Gridskipper points out an uprising of mid-West Nazism, which serves as a rejoinder to all the Santa-led anarchism from Santacon...
Anyways, I went to get a massage on Thursday night (at the alliterative Clapham Common Clinic), because on Tuesday night I did this and by Wednesday morning my left shoulder blade had a lump of muscle solidifying around it. My redoubtable masseuse, while spending half an hour working out the various knots and lumps around my shoulder (and god, it was sore for the next three days), dropped into conversation that it was the left shoulder because I was drinking too much, and that I could probably do with 3 days detox, and while she was at it, you only saw this level of disorganisation and disobedience in the musculature of the terminally alcholic. So maybe it was time for a break.
But these days, I view booze a bit like Anquetil did amphetamines - [ I'll only use it when absolutely necessary. When is it absolutely necessary? Almost all the time ] - so undaunted I went out on Friday night to a Hat Party in Brixton. Which wasn't very impressive. Seven people a party does not make, especially when they'd hired the whole back room of the Canterbury Arms, and then played some stultifying music. Hey ho. Home by midnight, awake again by 1pm on Saturday.
Thus Saturday a bit of a write off. Went for a run, but managed to misread my Garmin so badly that I thought I'd done 10k in 40 minutes, when in point of fact I'd burnt 1000 calories. There is a small yet substantial difference between these measurements, but at least I'm not confused any more. Out for a quiet drink with 12 Stone and Jason Stopadoodledoo in Carshalton, and then back home, to find the sister asleep on the sofa. Attempts to rouse her failed, so I left her to it, went to bed and then awoke at three to find she'd risen up and turned the TV back on. So not much sleep before Sunday.
Sunday: viewed babies, played with cats. Out for a meal without booze (a first, and mildly disappointed not to get to Mildred's, but that will teach you to go to a restaurant and not ensure that it's open on Sundays first) with a delectable somebody, and then back home to bed. Stifled a chortle at my sister's dismay as one of her kittens urinated on her bedsheets, and thus to bed. This is hardly Pepys, is it?
Oh, and only read two things this week - the guilty pleasure of the Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, which is one of the few things I've read recently that has got better as it's progressed (although that might not be saying much) and Advanced Marathoning which is very very good indeed. Although I'm not quite sure if it's wise to go for your black belt, your MA and a marathon in the same year, especially if you're aiming at knocking a lot out of your previous best...

Geoff Berner

Imagine if the Tiger Lillies were Jewish, in Vancouver and a bit thinner, with deeper voices. That's what this guy kind of sounds like. Thanks to John K for giving me the CD for my birthday. Stupid Cushtie left it in his hotel room in NYC... oh well. Anyway, as klezmer inflected accordion music goes, this man rocks. And he has a song entitled "My Dad's A Lawyer". Fantastic.

Freedom

As spotted by Richard Cushtie:
A statue of William Wallace was put up in the town of Stirling, following the success of the film Braveheart. But it's really a statue of Mel Gibson instead of Wallace... so a local took a hammer to the face. And now it's locked up in a cage at night, which is ironic given that the statue bears the word "Freedom" on the plinth.

A Rage In Harlesden

Well, Norff Lundun anyway. Had a job interview yesterday. In Golders Green. That was enough of a bad start. I mean, you don’t come back to work in London because you really enjoy taking the Northern Line so far out that it comes out of the ground. Call me a purist, but Underground trains should remain just that.
Got there 5 minutes late. If the train hadn’t sat in a tunnel for 10 minutes without moving, this wouldn’t have happened, but that’s hardly an excuse. Except then the person interviewing me was 20 minutes late, so that kind of went by the by. Ended up with two prehistoric blokes, one of which seemed on his last legs and about to fall asleep, and the other one intent on alternately insulting and patronizing me as hard as he could. Plus neither of them had actually worked there for more than a month, so when I asked them a question or two about the company, they didn’t know. Realised I was going for broke when the magic phrase "I'm smarter than anyone else I work with, and I don't mean that arrogantly" came flowing out of my mouth. By now I’m quite steamed. Went back down into the hole in the ground, back to work again. Don’t think I’ll be working at that place, then.

The Statue Of Liberty's not all that...

 
But check my hat! It's awesome, suckers! 

So far behind, I thought I was ahead

OK, so I had nothing to read again, so I bought GQ in the East Croydon WHSmiths, because it was the fattest magazine on the rack. Unfortunately, that's because most of it is advertising, but never mind. Leafing through it, I found mention of Ben Folds' cover of Bitches Ain't Shit, so it was off to iTunes for me, and now the damn song is stuck in my head.
Now to begin with, I thought what a clever Mr Cushtie I am for finding this, except that:
(a) I didn't find it, GQ did
(b) GQ found it about 18 months after it was released
(c) Arguably, the Straight Out Of Compton cover by Verucca Salt's lead singer, the saintly Kim (and here I show myself up by forgetting whether she's Gordon, Deal, or another surname entirely) is much better, and what are all these existentially-challenged singer-songwriter indie types doing anyway, massacreing perfectly decent bits of early 90's gangsta rap?
Now, if you leave the odd feeling of guilt aside (free to every liberal with their copy of the Guardian), and don't feel any concern that few hip hop artists cover indie songs in return (they just take samples of woeful Elton John songs and then shout over the top to drown him out), isn't the strange fact not that these cover versions exist, but that we think they're so strange, when firstly they're very common now, and in any case, isn't Tricky's cover of Black Steel the original and strangest (or at least the first one to change the gender of the singer and fail to update the lyrics accordingly?)
S*P*E*C*I*A*L prize to the first person to out-pseud me on this, and mention a hip-hop cover that predates Tricky of similar or greater inappropriateness. Duran Duran's White Lines doesn't count.

The most expensive bike part in the world?

Ok, so Bromley Bike has its faults, not least amongst them the huge prices for boutique kit, and the comedy self-destructing wheel they built for the Pugilist's 222. But at least they'll sell you what you ask for (no, Cycle Surgery, I do want a road bike with discs, because when I ride to work drunk I really don't have any margin to wait for some crappy old canti brakes to maybe slow me down a little bit please. I want to stop now, thanks very much, and if I happen to lock the wheels or blithely sail over the handlebars, that's my choice).
And although Bromley Bike won't let you borrow a BB tool for 5 minutes the day after you spunked 200 quid on various Chris King fripperies ("because it might get scratched"), at least they didn't do what Evans did to me this morning.
Today, I feel like the richest man alive, because I spent a pound on a 5mm 1 1/8" headset spacer. Strangely, at that price it wasn't brought to me atop a small velvet cushion, nor with a bow tied round it made of gold ribbon, nor with a little fanfare of trumpets to accompany me wasting money so profigately. And I didn't even get a bag. Or am I just over sensitive to London prices right now?

See how they run

Motion Based now lets you show other people how fast you were when you last strapped a GPS to yourself. Is this a good thing, or will it reveal too much about my less-than-illustrious waddling around South London?

The Page Turner

Just back from the cinema for 15 minutes, before I hop on the bike and ride home. The Page Turner is lovely: it's French, it's got various acts of evil in it, and it's wonderfully simple in conceit (each act of revenge makes sense in retrospect, but at least the crowning glory of them isn't what you would have predicted in advance - but then maybe that's because I'm reared on a diet of Hollywood rubbish...). And it's only 85 minutes long, so it never outstays its welcome.
(It's not this by the way, which maybe sounds promising were it not for the fact that the synopsis made me laugh, and I'm not sure as the death of a dachshund, or a character named after a stop on the Northern Line, were intended to provide hilarity...

You can't do that

I like UNION statements. I like SQL Server. I like materialized views.
So why can't my three friends play together? Now I miss my old chum DB2, and wish he'd come back...

Books about data warehousing

[Did I mention that SQL Server 2005 has the nicest wizards for setting up OLAP cubes (well, as per previous posts, haven't tried Oracle yet, but I expect any database where everyone prefers to use a tool named after a warty amphibian rather than the default software won't be that helpful) ?]
Anyhow, here's a dilemma. Those of us who do data warehousing all know that the bible is Kimball's mighty book. But what about this Microsoft SQL Server specific version? Is it likely to be half a book you already have, or is it better to have it all in one big lump?
Well, I'm off to Foyles this lunchtime to try and find out. And then expense the book on the company account. Woot!

The joys of live music

Went to the Water Rats tonight, saw Hello Saferide. Now, in honesty they could have just played Introducing... and Toby and I would have been happy. But they're great live - a huge mob of Scandinavians on stage at once, a melodica, and an incredibly venemous rendition of Last Bitter Song. And they didn't leave High School Stalker till last, which is a sign of courage, right.
First band up - single singer-songwriter with good lyrics, but the guitar wasn't all that. What was really frustrating was the headliners, Au Revoir Simone. I say this because their live sound doesn't really seem to come through on CD the way it does at the gig. OK, that's partly to do with having a few beers inside you, but also what they complained about from the soundman (thunderous bass that made your body shake) is just what you miss from the recordings of their songs. Had to get the train back, so left early, but the first 5 songs or so were pretty great, in a langourous, Roland keyboard type way. What the Cushtie Jazz Big Band could have been, if we had had 3 female singers and an attention span...
What else: still recovering from Saturday's party extravaganza - up to no good, up to 5 in the morning, chatting to a diminutive Italian beauty* in a bathroom full of beer, and then talking an accountant from Brighton into submission later on. Amazing what the power of a well timed talk can do to people.
*Somehow persuaded into coming to the gig. Has gravity changed direction, or are we reaping the other side of months of bitter moodiness at never going out and meeting interesting people, by getting all the fun at once?

Good news and better news

Not only am I going to see Hello Saferide next week, but she's got a new song out. And it looks like a whole bunch of other Scandinavians have too : Oh No, It's Christmas...

Red Road

I didn't realise it would be as dark as it was; when there's a cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart at the start, and before you recognise it you think it sounds like a cover of a cheerful pop song that you can't quite remember, that's a sign it wasn't a very happy film.
Possibly it's a little overlong, and I won't go on about the plot much, because various reviews I've read had me trying to second guess the ending a little too much, but very well shot. Occasional flying plastic bags are redolent of American Beauty, but at least there's no nincompoop telling you how beautiful it is to watch them dance.
And it has a sex scene in the front of a Renault van, which is always good when played for laughs. Maybe it goes on a little too long at the end (just before the resolution, you start checking your watch and wondering how many more of the 113 minutes there are to go), but then it's rare to have a film that's secure enough to sit in silence for a while.

Good timing, or drinking too much?

Only had three pints last night, went to bed, woke up at 1.30 this morning feeling a bit hmmm... as one might, only to realise I was actually throwing up at the time. Managed to avoid making any mess or choking to death, but is that a sign to pull my head in a bit and not knock back the booze?

An honest comparison of databases

Most people who compare databases have an axe to grind, and a fairly jaundiced view of the opposition (insert MS/IBM links here). If they’re not employed by the company that makes the thing, then usually there’s a terrible prejudice engendered by only ever using the one database, and therefore believing the other one to be rubbish just because it’s different. (This was neatly summarised on Usenet a long time ago, although there’s an obvious counterpoint to the idea that you’ll prefer that which you’re most familiar with*). Now, nobody can honestly claim to be independent, but I do have at least a few reasons to justify having opinions that aren’t solely the product of hard cash or only ever using one system.

In my life, there’s been heartache and pain. As well as that, I’ve used Access 97, 2000 (settle down, I know they’re not ‘really’ databases), SQL Server 7, 2000, 2005, Informix 8, postgresql, mySQL and DB2 UDB 8 and 9. About the only thing I haven’t touched is Oracle, and that’s mainly because it seemed too common; one of the great things about programming for Informix is you always seem to be able to say “If we had Oracle, this would work much better” and get away with it, rather than actually bothering to optimise your application.

So why DB2? Well, when I finished smoking crack**, it seemed like the thing to do. Plus I’d never used it, it turned out to be marginally cheaper than SQL Server, and at the time my curmudgeonly IT team kept telling me that you couldn’t run PHP with SQL Server, because it wasn’t Open Source.***

I used it for three years, I didn’t ever get to play in a WW2 tank like IBM promised me, and in total I got a cup of black coffee and two ballpoint pens as bribes. These were all long after the procurement procedure, so I don’t think they blighted my perspective.

A few things that are different between Microsoft and IBM
Tablespaces – designed to upset people by being one extra thing to think about, and most people don’t like thinking. Microsoft do the decent thing and hide it away somewhere, so it never bothers you. But don’t forget Douglas Adams’ maxim: The only difference between something that can go wrong, and something that can’t go wrong, is that when the latter does go wrong, it’s harder to fix.
Schemas Likewise. If you never had them, it’s a frightful pain to encounter them. But if you have had them, and then you find you don’t get the ability to divide up your database by purpose of tables, views, etc, without ReallyLongNamingConventions, you tend to miss them.
CaSE sEnsItIvIty DB2 is case sensitive on table names, in certain scenarios. This is rather annoying. mySQL seems to always be case sensitive, and SQL Server doesn’t care. But on the other hand, DB2 is always case sensitive when it comes to the contents of a column, and the other two don’t seem to be. And to be honest, that’s more annoying: MR JOHN SMITH is not how Mr John Smith wants to be addressed, thank you very much. Opinion and coding practice will imply for you whether you’ll be more annoyed by DB2 or SQL Server.
DTS workflow I like tools where you can easily drag and drop tasks and build relationships between them. I like SQL Server for this. I heavily resent DB2 for making me handcode a lot more of this.
Chaining tasks in DB2 But I also like the way that DB2 is good at having tasks trigger other tasks, in more complicated ways than the success/failure/anyway that SQL Server implements within DTS.

More as it comes to me, or if anybody makes a helpful suggestion. A lot of these differences boil down to nothing works out of the box vs nothing ever gets better than it was out of the box, but your mileage may vary.

* which might be called The DBA’s Lament: “I may be more experienced with ugly women, but I still prefer beautiful ones”
** as in “hmm. That’s an interesting application. Say next week, me and the CEO are smoking crack, and we decide it has to run on DB2. Can you handle that?” – this always provokes interesting behaviour from salespeople. Try it some time.
*** Yes, I know. It just seemed a bit odd to be talking to ‘the database expert’ and have to teach them how to suck ODBC eggs, and I figured it was really political grief (it’s not politic to actually ask people to do any work) that was getting in the way of some Microsoft product.

Choose your enemies carefully

Can there be any more wonderful sight, than to see a slightly mad looking woman riding a bike through south London, banging on the side of a transit van because it got to within three feet of her, yelling in a transatlantic accent, and then veering through a red light on her way to Waterloo?

Perhaps there is. Next time, I shall take my camera when I go commuting...

Is it ok to draft or not?

There’s probably a few reasons not to:

• You’re relying on the guy in front not to make a mistake and send you both into a pothole or the back of a car.
• If the commute is really a contra le monte type deal (and let’s face it, it always is) then you shouldn’t really be drafting, should you? (You should be wearing a skin suit and an aero helmet and grimacing like Jan Ulrich after a wrap of speed in a nightclub and too many pies, but that’s another story)
• It’s a bit rude to suck somebody else’s wheel.

The last one is the one I’m not sure about. Is there an etiquette to urban riding, whereby you should swap duties on the front? After all, there’s nothing more annoying than somebody riding on your wheel and never making any contribution. On the other hand, I’ve got a riser bar on the front of my bike, so I’m never going to be as aerodynamic as the chap with drops, and if they overtake you, well, they were going fast anyway, so should they really complain if you tag along? Take last night; I was pretty knackered, bumbling along between Brixton station and Herne Hill, and somebody goes flying past me on a Scott carbon. I draft him until I bottle it when he goes between a van and a taxi, and then gradually reel him in, until we get to the lights at Herne Hill. Not that we exchange any conversation, and I was encountering competency deficiencies with my SPDs that evening, but on the way from Herne Hill up to Dulwich, the joy of a mountain bike block means I could still take the front, so there was some exchange of effort. Then he smoked me on the first bit of Crystal Palace, but since his home was only a quarter of the way up, I guess he didn’t need to save any effort. So you nod to the other guy as one of you goes past, and that’s that. It’s not like we’re looking to have a discussion of gear ratios, after all.
[Then again, if you wanted to go all Eddy Merckx on it, the sole reason for drafting somebody is to destroy them, and all you’re doing is saving a bit of energy for later use against them. But possibly that is quite rude]
And after all, by drafting them you’re not helping much, but (if my physics isn’t too out of line) there could be some imperceptible benefit to the man in front. Oh, and I have to ride over Crystal Palace, which most of the people I draft don’t seem to, so maybe I need all the help I can get.

A reason to not commute by train

The BBC pointed out about some "human graffiti" that's spreading across the rail network.
Could this be coincidental, or is the London Underground plan to use anti-flu spray on the Tube related, I wondered.
Ben put me right:
Anti flu spray? They need an anti turd spray. Yes, I'm talking about a spray which is effective for eight hours when used in an enclosed space. A spray that will turn shit into dust so quickly and effectively that it works as the shit leaves the arsehole. Our man will be operating like a vacuum cleaner in reverse. Staff can then come and sweep up the mess and no harm is done.
The trouble is that people will be amazed by this powerful spray, they will want to try it out. Bored youths will be riding the last train home with their greasy tracksuit bottoms around their ankles, trying to blow clouds of dust in each other's pasty faces. The problem of course will be that one of them, the slackjawed, coldsore encrusted one who smokes on trains and buses, may have opened a window, thus reducing the effectiveness of the spray throughout the whole train. Young people will occasionally find themselves shitting in each other's faces on public transport. Perhaps it will become like a twisted version of russian roulette. I hope I die before this day comes - peacefully, in blissful ignorance of the horrors that await Britain, and of an illness or injury entirely unrelated to face shitting.
While we're at it, did anyone who watched Children Of Men think of the positive of no more children - there wouldn't be the school run jamming up our roads throughout the year any more. That's got to ameliorate the end of the human race somewhat...

Could I be training too much?

Well, after my frustration at CycleSurgery, found somebody who would sell me a bike that I wanted. Funnily enough, it happened to be Bromley Bikes, who usually look down their nose at you if you don't want to spunk three grand on a revolutionary new Yeti full susser that quiet now - probably doesn't work very well. Anyway, it's too new a bike to have a picture at Trek's website yet, but I'm very pleased. It's got disc brakes, and skinny tyres, and a rigid fork, and a rack, which turns out to be wonderfully practical in London - no more sweaty back - in fact no more back pain - and it goes pretty quick. It doesn't have quite the snap away from traffic lights that I'm used to with 26" wheels, and a fully rigid bike isn't always fun, and Crystal Palace hill never gets any easier, but it's all good. So far I've got my commute down to 58 minutes + shower (instead of 10 minutes to the station, 29 minutes on the train, 17 minutes to the office and still need a shower, but not have any clothes to change into...)
But anyway, now I've gone and dumped 500 notes on a new bike, I've got to justify my purchase, which means riding to work as often as possible. So Monday & Tuesday I did work and back, and then Wednesday it was the Luke Haines gig at the Luminaire in Kilburn (great use of musical saw, but a bit short. oh, and although Vinny Peculiar was great, the first support act were abominable.). Then Thursday I got drunk with an old friend, and then Friday it was off to Reading for a wedding. Excuses, excuses, eh?
So today, back on the bike despite missing out on sleep all weekend, and thankfully it's half term so the roads are clear. But having ridden to work, worked, and then ridden home again, I still had to go and do a 3 mile run. Why? Because Mr Higdon says so, and you disobey him at your cost. Not long till January, after all, and the half marathon. And I want to beat my 1:45 so bad, I just might.
Thus last week, the plan said do 5 400m sprints, so I did that. On a Tuesday night after riding 20km home. (Isn't it great to use kilometres instead of miles? Sounds so much more significant...) And although the ride wasn't bad, the run - crumbs, it almost finished me off. I was sweating like a murderer by the end of it. Tomorrow it's a tempo run (not sure what that means, but it's going to involve some 4:30 km action at the very least. Although right now, braggadocio demands that I say that can't be that hard.
So anyway, this will be quite a good experiment to see if I can cycle and run in the same day, every day of the week, and will at least hint about whether the Iron Man is a good idea or a bad one. Or maybe I'll learn some respect for the half marathon distance.
Tangentially, got a Garmin Forerunner to play with. Mortifyingly, once you have an accurate GPS sensor, you find out that the 40mph you thought you could pull down Crystal Palace hill was probably only ever 30, and that route you thought was 3 miles was more like 1 and a half. But it's made intervals and fartlek a bit easier, in that you don't have to worry about figuring out what distance is 400m, or a km, or 2 km, any more. You just run and run, and then you stop. Garmin's software's not so great though - although the GPS is working fine, when you download your workouts to your machine, the training system develops amnesia every other day. Not impressed. Motion Based looks like it might be fun though.
Oh, and Wednesday night I start doing shorinji kempo again. Fingers crossed.

Nike 10k

43:34. Which is my best 10k time to date. Hoorah.
Actually, a very odd experience to run through Hyde Park with several thousand other people at the same time. Not sure that it was a very well organised race, but then if you've got to get tens of thousands of people through the course in just a few hours, there will be problems, crowds, etc etc. (Well, actually I was just bitter because my dad got lost in the park and took an hour to find me, by which point I was shaking like a dog and in a right sulk. Hey ho :) )

No, you don't want one of those

Wandering around London on Saturday, saw a lot of hybrids with disc brakes. (Not sure if hybrid is the fashionable name for a bike which looks a bit like a mountain bike, but with decent slick tyres for the road, rigid fork, etc). Anyway, thought that was a jolly good idea (I don't get on very well with maintaining v-brakes), so popped into Cycle Surgery in Holborn, and lo and behold, there's the bike I saw half an hour ago, for only 425 quid. Which is easier than wasting time trying to build up some of the things in my shed into anything usable, a state of affairs which is kind of lamentable but never mind.
"Can I try it out?"
"It's too small for you"
"It's a 17 inch frame"
"Yes, that's much too short for you"
OK, I'm a bit annoyed at this point. I like small bikes. I don't want a 19" monstrosity that looks like I'm riding a farmyard gate with wheels at either end. I want this bike.
But no. And it gets worse. The guy at the counter starts asking me why I want disc brakes. Because they're more powerful and they don't wear out as fast as rim brakes. Oh no sir. That can never happen. Disc brakes need just as much maintenance as v-brakes. Which is, I have to say twaddle. Hydraulic fluid doesn't stretch so that your brakes feel sloppier and sloppier as the year goes on, you don't waste years of your life trying to stop them squeal (oh, apart from owners of these brakes) and they feel better. Particularly if you're used to them from all your other bikes. OK, they might in the long term need some maintenance, but the simple fact of the matter is that disc brakes will work consistently without maintenance for a lot longer than Vs. And V's look a bit gash. And it's me that's going to be riding this bike, not the chappy trying to avoid selling it to me in Cycle Surgery.
So I'm sorry Pret A Manger, actually your customer service was quite good. I mean, you even deign to sell me the things I want to buy. Now if you'd just start stocking bikes...

Coffee shop CRM

I went to Pret today on Charing Cross Road to get lunch. They'd run out of brie baguettes, so they gave me a free coffee while somebody ran downstairs and made one.
Now unfortunately, I don't like Pret coffee very much. I think I'm used to Cafe Nero too much (twice as much espresso per cup, and thus a proper taste, whereas Pret tastes more like warm coffee flavoured milk).
But not to look a gift horse in the mouth, several ideas suggest themselves:

• Pret are so keen to keep customers loyal that they'll give away a cup of coffee every time they fail to live up to expectations


• Pret make so big a profit on every sandwich that they can afford to give away coffee


• Somebody, somewhere at Pret has a spreadsheet and they've worked out the lifetime value of a customer is better if occasional sandwich-provision-failure is compensated for by free coffee, because the long term value maximises their return

But I'm not sure about the value of customer loyalty. After all, this is a busy thoroughfare, frequented by all sorts of passing trade. Just because I have a good experience in Pret once doesn't necessarily imply I'll ever be back.
On the other hand, maybe I'll now feel that Pret in general is so generous that I'll favour them over other coffee shops in future. So although they've lost out in the short term, long term loyalty improves.
Perhaps it's a different situation in central London to elsewhere. After all, on the way to Pret I've got Eat, Subway, a coffee shop whose name I can't remember, and that's before I've even left Soho Square. Then there's Benjy's, the competing Italian place over the road, Starbucks ... if it wasn't for this density of coffee shops, perhaps loyalty would be more important. Or less important: if there was only Pret and nobody else on the street, they'd hardly need to work to keep me loyal.
All that said, it wasn't a great sandwich, and even a free cup of Pret latte isn't as good as a paid-for Cafe Nero one. So have I learnt anything from this?

The travails of moving house

So I've got a new job, working up in London, and as a result had to take everything out of my house in Folkestone and yomp it up the M20 to London. Whereupon I realised I had far more stuff than made any sense, and certainly much more than I could physically store (partly the consequence of this. So I've spent the morning trying to make a dent in this by listing books on Amazon, but there's still several boxes of CDs, a bass guitar amplifier and a million other things I don't know what to do with, but I do want rid of.
I've also got a lot of books that aren't in good enough nick to sell, so if you'd like a list of what I have, email me and I'll furnish you with a list of what there is. Be warned that it's partly the accumulation of being stuck in airports with nothing to read, so there's a lot of stuff I'm ashamed of on there. Oh, and lots of Terry Pratchett from when I was a lot younger, and quite a bit of Henning Mankell. But come on, don't be scared...
One strange thing you notice is the market for some DVDs. Take Dogma, for example. Not a wonderful film. But not exactly awful. And yet I'm the cheapest offering of it on Amazon, and I'm charging twelve pounds, which I'm pretty sure is about twice what I bought it for in Sainsbury's. Scarcity value? Right now it's the 8,322nd best seller, but I'm not entirely sure how good/bad/popular that makes it...

More drunken silliness

So, finished working for my old employer, and after turning up gray on the previous Friday through a satisfying combination of beer, gin and mouldy cheese (and then spending three hours vomitting constantly - that'll teach them not to give me gardening leave) they still let me go out on the second-to-last night of paid employment. Myself, a director, a head of department and a project manager all got to go see Avenue Q, which was great fun, and even better than I expected. Ended up getting to my hotel room at 3am, and then up at 7.30 for a breakfast meeting at Yahoo.
And here's where the fun starts. I go downstairs in the hotel for breakfast carrying my overnight bag, and one of the staff shows me a cupboard I can stow it in while I'm eating. I don't think she expected me to walk forwards and slam my head at full tilt into the lintel. I drop the bag, stagger back dazed and dizzy, only to find myself steadying myself by grabbing the buttock of another of the women working for the hotel. If only I'd then stepped in a bucket of custard and fallen down a flight of stairs, it would have been complete.
Get through the day (somehow). Have a really nice send off from work : flowers, balloon, the whole shebang. (Seriously. Will document my balloon fixation elsewhere...) Then Toby makes the fatal suggestion that we go for one last ride.
So, off to the woods we go. I don't have any lights, so I borrow some from Tim the Fastest Plumber in South East Kent. I don't have any pedals (they're still on the tandem since the S*** Damp W***) so I put on the pair Nick is selling Toby. And ten yards up the trail, the right one comes clean off its axle and I jam the axle into my foot. Ouch. Trail bodging is unsuccessful, so we all go to Tim's place and get a pair of Time pedals instead. And some clown shoes for me to wear.
Then back onto the trails. This time I forget my helmet, stack after about half an hour when the front wheel washes out, and then get a puncture on the front wheel I can't be bothered to fix, and while I'm turning white and falling over, ride back to the van. Quite a fun night, all told.
Saturday: moved. Parents went ape when they found the contents of a house in their living room, but I think they're over it now.
Sunday: locked myself out of my new flat. Whoops. Went to Greenwich with another Lady of the Internet. Think I got on really well - well, managed to make her laugh and she didn't run away, and she was that incredible combination of very pretty and actual personality. Counting down to the inevitable "I've actually already got a boyfriend/I'm carrying lots of baggage/you're clearly the child of Satan" email that I'll get later in the week. Or not. Hope springs eternal in a young man's breast, after all...
So, what have we learned?
(a) Whenever Nick gives you bike parts, they're fine and dandy. Whenever you exchange money with him for bike parts, something terrible seems to happen. Not Nick's fault - I think it's some strange curse to do with money. I'll try cowrie shells or getting him drunk instead of such fiduciary nonsense in the future.
(b) The Internet Is For Porn
(c) I learnt something from LotI today. But now I've forgotten it. So always take a pad and a pencil, people.

If you ever want to use a Unix box with your Mac

This should be useful: (thanks to Dr Kenwright for this howto...)

Couple of hoops to jump through but quite simple really


To run remote X11 programmes on your mac
1) get X11.app - if you are running OS X Panther (10.3) then you can
download this from Apple's website (http://www.apple.com/downloads/
macosx/apple/x11formacosx.html). If you are running 10.4 Tiger, then
I think you need the version they supply on the install disks.

2) Install it, it will go into /Applications/Utilities/X11.app

3) Run it


Now you need to edit /etc/ssh_config, which will have a section like
this:

# Host *
ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes
ForwardX11Trusted yes
# RhostsRSAAuthentication no
# RSAAuthentication yes

Now **I think** that the only bit you need to change is the
'ForwardX11 yes' which will probably look like
#ForwardX11 no

If this fails, then set ForwardAgent to yes as above.

The above section is from my ssh_config and I can't remember exactly
why each bit was turned on, so a little trial and error might help
and might vary with your network connection.

Save the file.

With X11 running, open up an xterm (top menu Applications ->
Terminal) and ssh into your favourite box and type the command to
start your preferred X11 programme. Note that this is an xterm NOT
Terminal.app

In order to run remote X11 apps from Terminal.app (which is a nicer
terminal programme) you need to determine the shell you are running
and set the environment variable DISPLAY to :0.0

Older OS X uses a tcsh shell, newer uses bash (I don't know when they
changed over though).
typing "echo $SHELL" in the Terminal will tell you which you have.

If bash you need to type
export DISPLAY=":0.0"
If tcsh then it is
setenv DISPLAY ":0.0"

The appropriate line can be put in ${HOME}/.profile for bash (OS X
seems to be a bit wierd about bash config files) or ${HOME}/.tcshrc
for tcsh (which works for Faye). Open up a new Termiinal.app and
type echo $DISPLAY to check it is set.

Now run X11.app in the background and run everything through
Terminal.app, remembering to ssh not telnet.

HTH

Chris.

Questions for database geeks

After 3 years of using DB2 on Linux, I'm leaving my current employers to go work for a SQL Server shop instead. In order to find my replacement, they're trying to put together a set of questions to get both some understanding of how wide candidates knowledge is, and how much DB2 specifics they know. Of the questions below, how many do you think are useful in determining if you've got somebody capable of keeping a DB2 instance up, developing new structures as new business problems arrive, and writing useful/performant SQL? (these therefore range from the inane to quite specific - how many do people feel are actually unfair? or should I just get some questions from Celko?)
[I'm not trawling for a job or for other recruitment purposes here, honest...]
1. I've got a bookings table with 20 million rows, broken down by product, region, date and customer number. It's not loading new data or querying very quickly. What should I do?
2. Do you like stored procedures?
3. What's an inline view?
4. How do you do a running sum when GROUP BY just gives you a total per row?
5. Do you prefer star schemas or snowflake schemas? Why?
6. I have a table with three columns: date (date), country (varchar(10)), bookings (int).
Write me a query that gives me a total by country of bookings made in the last 2 weeks, AND that displays the total number of bookings made in the last 2 weeks too.
7. Do you know what an MQT is?
8. If all my customers have been given x-y coordinates that describe the position of their house (ie every line in customer has x_coordinate (int) and y_coordinate (int), and Birmingham is at (35000, 55000), and Manchester is at (25000, 65000) and York is at (33000, 70000), then, assuming Euclidean geometry, give me a WHERE clause against the customer table to return only customers who live north of Birmingham and south of a line that passes through both York and Manchester.
9. I have two sets of customers with the same 15 columns. What's the best way to return only those customers that are in both sets, for whom the data is the same in both sets?
10. Give me a way to get the database to check on a daily basis if something surprising is happening to sales when compared with last year at the same time.
11. DB2 UDB LUW 8.1.4. For the next six months, ten new tables need to be created every day and automated routines set up to load them every day after they're created. You are the only personin the company responsible for administering the database. Do you use a DMS or SMS tablespace? Why?
12. Your manager has written some code that 'should take 5 minutes to run'. It takes 4 hours. What do you do?
13. Cube Views?
14. What SQL that you've written are you most proud of?
15. What are the disadvantages of HADR vis a vis RAC?
16. SQL Server federation vs DB2 Information Integrator - any thoughts?

Aftermath from the marathon

Finally got around to scanning in the photo from near the finish line in Tromso. So this is what I looked like 2 months and 12 days ago:

Very very angry, and very, very not going anywhere fast, by the looks of it...

Now here's the thing: I told one of the many and varied Women of the Internet (see previous posts) about the existence of this photograph, and she sounded amused. I'm now rather worried that if I do let her see it, what with the sexfaced expression I've got, the apparently gigantic neck that I possess, the fact that it looks as though my shorts are falling down and I have the arms of a famine victim, she might not want to meet me in person. So perhaps it should be bait to a personal encounter.

Au revoir, Kent

You never miss what you've got till it's gone. I could digress here about ex-girlfriends and other regrets, or the sad realisation when you leave home that those Tunnock's caramel wafers didn't buy themselves, it was your mother's doing, but that's not what this is about. Nor is it about the pain of having to buy a Dell laptop because I can't be sure I can get away with an Apple in my first contracting job...
Rather, it's finding something I really like about Kent. In under three weeks I'll be back in the Smoke like I always wanted to be, working for a company in central London.
But in the meantime, I can leave the house at ten at night and go running in the countryside, without fear of happyslappers, hoodies or any other suburban horrors.
Quite honestly, it's beautiful round Hawkinge on a summer's night when there's no clouds. Folkestone is there beneath you, glowing like a million birthday candles. Above you, the sky is starry, and all around it's dark.
To begin with, I was running with my Petzl on, and turning it off when I deemed it unnecessary. That leaves you with a couple of seconds blindness, because the reflected glow against my fingers is enough for my irises to contract, so when the light is switched off there's nothing for them to see. Which is fun.
So is feeling your way down the street through your feet, rather than relying on your eyes. And it's great that all the bloody dogs that usually bark at you have gone to bed. Although that fear that you'll slip and break a leg is never too far from the front of your mind.
But that just adds spice to it. Along with the rustling sound of something running through the fields, parallel to your path. Don't ever slow down, because if that badger overtakes you, he'll know that you're broken, a worthy and willing victim for those claws of his. So you carry on running, towards dimly lit bungalows, then past them, up the hills again.
Petzl back on. Amazing how many signs are reflective and show up better at night - including that ghastly big sign for the cattery. And who says you never see a happy jogger? Well, of course you don't. The only happy ones are the ones running at night, and we all dress in dark colours and cover our faces with camo.
Finally, having run to the dogging spot above Peen and turned back, there's a run up through a tunnel of pitch black, where the trees blot out even the light from the sky. It's only a combination of memory and trying to run in the centre of the road, where you can feel the mud, that keeps you going in what you think is the right direction, until you're back in your identikit terraced house again.
A quick shower - quicker when you find the hot water wasn't turned back on - and then slip between fresh clean sheets, all the better for knowing that at 6 in the morning you have to be up to put in another 5k.

Kew Gardens

Took a girl to Kew Gardens. Learnt several things.

• Kew Gardens is very expensive, unless you think it's alright to pay £11.75 to troll around some grass while every thirty seconds a jumbo jet flies overhead


• Don't go in the greenhouses if it's 28 degrees outside. You're not going to find respite from the heat in there


• But if you do, you'll see a sign that curiously uses the weight of 'an average television set' (30kg, apparently) to describe how heavy a seed pod is


• There's a bloody big bonsai on display


• Finally, and most importantly, just because Kew Gardens advertises the compost heap on the map of attractions, and despite it being one of the largest compost heaps in Britain, it doesn't seem to inspire romantic thoughts in the women who look upon it

That is all.

Hoorah! You've pulled!

Sadly, it turns out to have been a Russian robot:

I have decided to write to you and my name is Irina!
You profile has liked to me and yours you look well in a picture.
First of all I want to tell to you that I search for serious relations and
I want find that with whom could to live for a long time and happily.
I would like to tell to you a little about myself. I the educated girl, a harmonious body; mine tall 5 ' 8 ",
My weight 123 pounds, I have hair of the black. I cheerful, with good sense of humor.
For me it is really necessary soul mate and the reliable friend! I hope that you will answer.
I would like to send you some pictures myself and I shall be pleased to answer you if you write to me.
I shall wait and hope, that you will not ignore my letter.
Thanks! C HOPE , Irina.
PS! I would like to ask you that you wrote to me on email, as I have no a lot of time to be on the Internet,
irinaloves@rambler.ru


"I have hair of the black"? What on earth is that? Mine tall ?
Maybe I'll pass on Irina's particulars to Barry's dad for checking out... In the meantime, if anyone's lonely and wants to mail her...

Why personalisation is a bad thing for most business

A few years ago, personalisation was the next big next big thing. I worked on a personalisation project for my previous employer that sucked up about a million pounds of software licensing, and heavens knows how many people's salary, lives for six months, etc etc. And when they got to the end of it, what did they have? Not personalisation, by any stretch. Maybe the ability to segment some of the emails they sent to their customers, but that was about it. (And now it doesn't look like they segment at all, or at least not to any of the things like purchase history that are meant to segment mailing lists. They leave it up to the customer to say what newsletter they want to receive, which, in all honesty, isn't personalisation except in the most trivial sense. It's good marketing, but that's a different beast entirely...)
But there are a number of reasons why personalisation isn't a very good goal for most companies. Consider some of the fallacies:
We've got to be like Amazon OK, that's great. Amazon hold a lot of data on things different people purchase, and then tailor the home page and recommendation lists to accord with your purchase history. But they're Amazon. They got there first, and unless you're also a huge internet retailer, you won't have either the computational power to match them, or the flow of data to analyse in the first place. Amazon get lots of low ticket items with high frequency, which is a good place to be in, but it's occupied by people like them and FMCG retailers. An awful lot of the rest of the market just isn't like that.

We need to be a community Yes, because people spend a lot of time on community sites like Flickr and Friendster (remember them?) or Myspace, or ...
Yes, but they're sharing photos, or glomming contacts from old friends for future business networking, or being teenagers. They're not buying your product, and unless it's a product people want to talk about a lot, with other likeminded souls, chances are that you're not going to build much of a community up.

We need eyeballs! Yes, you're right. The more impressions you get, the more money you'll make. And it's still 1997, right?
Sorry, this just doesn't stand up against any rigorous mental effort. Sure, if you got 1 purchase for every 1,000 people that looked at your home page, if the conversion rate stayed the same then you'd double your purchases if you had 2,000 people. But the conversion rate won't stay the same if you just grab impressions from everywhere. Quantity does not always have a quality of its own. That bloke that stands on Piccadilly Circus with a megaphone proselytising for Jesus sure has a wide audience, but does he get many converts? And what if you've got 10 million visitors every day, but only a thousand of them purchase? You've still got all that extra bandwidth that you have to service, servers to pay for, people to look after them ... Oh, and why did you need personalisation to get that volume anyway? Why didn't you just get some compelling content? People don't go to the cinema because they get a personal experience, they go because there's something good to watch.

I'll come back and edit this post a bit later. There's a few bits of statistics to talk about, and maybe a rant about the long tail. Then I'll try and be positive and say what I think is more worthy than personalisation, or at least personalisation per se.

Ha Ha - Very Funny, Motherf**ker!

And that, as Nick pointed out, is possibly the funniest phrase in the English language. At least when spoken by Eddie Murphy.
Outside of that, this is quite funny. Thanks be to Toby for that.
Nothing much else has been funny this weekend. I encountered first hand the fun of too much very strong coffee on Friday (if you really want to know the consequences, email me and I'll tell you), and then on Saturday had two punctures. Or rather, two valve stems ripped off the rear tyre on the Klein. At least the rear wheel didn't come out due to another axle/bolt failure. Seems right now that the bike is cursed, but I'm still hopeful it'll be working by the time it gets to Stockholm. MUST NOT get the DFL brand, no matter what (this may involve sabotaging Toby's bike, or just getting too drunk to participate in the race...)
Anyway, Saturday afternoon I tried to get to Fruitstock. Somehow (don't ask) got lost at Baker Street and couldn't find Regent's Park for a full hour, and by the time I did get there, couldn't find the festival (could hear a banjo recital going on nearby though) and then, almost apoplectic with rage and ready to punch out a tree, found the sign to the festival at about 4.55. Well angry by now, I realised that the last thing I should be getting stressed about was enjoying myself, so I tried sitting under a tree for half an hour. Was still very angry, so stomped off to the Crown & Sceptre in Great Titchfield Street, and had a couple of pints with Dead Hugh. Then back to pick up the Klein from Nick, and home.
Next day, up bright and early, played tennis, rode bike, went to pub, really enjoyed myself. Well, actually couldn't drag myself out of bed until about 1pm, missed tennis (oops), went back to bed again, felt gutted and utterly depressed all day. Then drove home, went riding in the woods with Toby, didn't crash (but wimped out of everything interesting), went home, watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (which is pretty good, but not as good as I had hoped for.
And exhale...
Addendum: this is what you get when you type define naivety into Google. Sure there's a joke waiting for its punchline there...

Internet Dating & Philosophy

While driving around today, realised that some of my mutterings on game theoretic approaches to dating were neatly summarised a few hundred years ago, by good old Pascal and his Wager. (For details of which, I'll point you here) for a short explanation. Of course, we're computing the right thing to do with meeting women, rather than selection of appropriate belief structures, but I think the point holds true nonetheless.
Not wishing to give up hope, I guess it may be time to have a pop at the Wager itself, and suggest reasons why it doesn't hold up. Will do so when I get back from my conference call...

Teabreak's over, back on your heads!

Played tennis this weekend twice. Got my vicious drop shot working reliably, only to see Gerald skid, slip and pull a hamstring trying to return one. Thus filled with guilt.
Otherwise, weekend reasonably uneventful. Slept quite a bit. Still don't have a serviceable mobile phone, so out of contact quite a bit. Met up with chums on Sunday, inspected Nick's babies once more (now 4 months and a day old) and in the evening went on a date.
This went better than last week's - at least we were both capable of boozing to a compatible level of inebriation. And I think I made her laugh, and she did use the word peregrination in open conversation. But still, no great spark leapt between us to say hey, this is the person you want to stay with for the rest of your life. Oh well.
Then again, from a game theoretic point of view, maybe this is never going to happen. And herein could be the fundamental problem with internet dating: there's too much choice.
Suppose you met people only occasionally, and somebody turned out to be interesting, reasonably attractive and not obviously possessed of unhygienic or disgusting habits. Maybe you'd throw caution to the wind, trust in serendipity and take things a bit further. You wouldn't necessarily need that WOW factor to be present; it might evolve gradually.
Whereas the benefit and the drawback of the internet is that you can obtain a steady stream of new people each week, and if you're going to be rational about it, why commit to any one of them when the next one might be even better?
Clearly there are some things to be said here about relative risk aversion, and how that might change from year to year, as you became more and more desperate to avoid ending up being eaten by your Alsatian after you expired as a lonely 94-year old. I'm not sure, however, that applying game theory to dating is going to be too profitable an approach.
I'm going to review this once a month and publish conversion statistics, see where we get to. Possibly I'll graph it too, and then this blog will attract some statistic-obsessed woman who's desperate to have a Cushtie in her life. Or at least I'll get some more interesting spam.