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.

Not long to go now...

Right, entry to SSWC06 is paid up.
Flights are booked with good old, "allegedly price-fixing" BA.
Hotel (or is it a boat?) booked to stay in Stockholm.
SIDs are still crappy, but hopefully a bit more pressure and we'll be running less than 70% sag.

New bike, more books

Well, actually the same old same old bike:



That's my old Klein (the first decent mountain bike I owned), resurrected. Brakes are Mono Minis scavenged off my Prince Albert, SIDs are what used to decorate the front end of Nick's Litespeed, stem, bars and doofer are all brand new, and the rest is of varying age. This little beasty is built up for the World Singlespeed Champs in Stockholm this August, assuming I manage to get there and there isn't some onerous requirement (like, say, competence) to exclude drunks like myself and Toby. Tried to persuade Jason to come along too, but he's too busy shooting people/contemplating his dislocated shoulder/sceptical that a bunch of XC jeyboys are really going to drink that much at the moment...
Anyhow, it's pretty light (compared to the 222, anyway) and now the SIDs probably work, and the rear brake isn't pissing fluid everywhere, it should be quite fun. (Went riding on Thursday night in Kent, did a few decent singletrack downhills. Fork had about 0.5mm of travel everywhere, felt completely rock solid. Woke up on Friday morning feeling as beaten up as when I'd been riding my old Inbred with the super-super-rigid fork Brant invented to punish singlespeeders with. Turned out on closer inspection that there was no oil in the fork, so air kept merrily flowing from positive to negative chamber and never bothered to help with damping any of the shocks. Happily, that's now resolved. And I can now use both brakes, too.)
Read Double Fault by Lionel Shriver. This depressed me and put my tennis game off at the weekend, which further depressed me. From having read two Shrivers now, I guess the Secret Formula for her novels is:
Two people fall in love.
Two people get married.
Two people find they resent one another.
Somebody loses an eye.
There are no happy endings.
Meanwhile, reading Conrad's The Secret Agent, which I was surprised to find rather funny. But tales of espionage are always better when leavened with shops selling pornography/prophylactics and imbecile brothers-in-law. And picked up Sillitoe's Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, which for the first chapter alone (man drinks 11 pints and 7 small gins, falls down stairs, vomits over old man's best suit) is well worth the price of admission. Haven't finished that Tim Harman yet...

Things that Internet Dating Has Taught Me

1. All women work in Financial Services.
2. 98% of them are reading The Da Vinci Code.
3. "Open minded" is not necessarily a synonym for "prefers anal sex".
4. There are only three (3) women in the world who are more than 5'4" tall.
5. If they've seen the film Secretary, they think it's really sexy. Rather than something in which Donnie Darko's sister wets herself. Although thinking about it...
6. Don't drink twice as much as her on the first date. Particularly not on an empty stomach. On a hot day. Even if you do think her chin is a bit big, you should still make the effort. (added 25th July 2006)
7. Likewise, don't drink 5 pints of Hoegaarden the night before and then play tennis on the morning of your date, while forgetting to eat anything to stave off your hangover. Otherwise this tends to happen. I suppose 7a must be that women don't like to meet men with the DTs, [mostly]
8. If they're not reading The Da Vinci Code, they're more than likely reading Heat magazine. If neither, you're hopefully onto a winner.

Jolly nice weekend

Friday - Nick and Toby came round and respectively cleaned and tidied the house for me and built up the Klein as a singlespeed. It feels like the best it's ever been set up - that short conrod stem and the Pablo Escobars make it feel really nice and chuckable. Shame the rear brake isn't plumbed in yet, but that should be achieved Tuesday.
Went for a drink down the Oval on Friday night with Jason - felt like death, got home about midnight, had an interesting dream about signals intelligence interrupted at 2am by the cat howling at me. Put it out, went back to bed.
Ran 4.5 miles in 37.5 minutes, spent the afternoon feeling awful and reading Falling Angel. Which is ok, but if you know the twist, the whole book seems like an exercise in form and nothing else.
Further, because it's written in such pared-down language, you never feel enough of the horror that the latter parts should engender in you.
But maybe that's just how it is; I remember missing the first half hour of Angel Heart and thinking how increibly dark and mysterious it was. And then I bought the DVD and realised I hadn't missed the first half hour, I'd missed the first 5 minutes, and it was an awful lot less than I'd given it credit for. Oh well.
To Covent Garden in the evening to see the Camden Chamber Orchestra (James T playing violin). Some Mendelssohn - very nice, and I was familiar with it for a change, which helps. But then some Shostakovich, where the solo cellist kept getting lost (not hard, given how tough the piece sounded) - although since it was Shostakovich, if she'd just barrelled on, probably half of us wouldn't have even noticed. As it was, the frequent pauses and discussions with the conductor made it clear that Something Was Up. And the cellist did look Very Cross. Very muscular too though - I guess that's all that frantic bowing for you.
Had two pints of Stella, got drunk very fast - didn't eat enough on Saturday, and I felt blindsided to have gone off and been cultural, and then had wife-beater foisted on me. Got home about 1 am, meddled with the internet, went to bed.
Up at 7.30 on Sunday, drove to play tennis while not really capable of seeing straight. Lost 6-3, 3-1, I think - bit blurry towards the end. Then drove at pace to Jonny's. Was racing a Ferrari some of the way there - nice to see that you can keep pace in a beat-up old Golf, but then it wasn't the open road. Had some hilarious aggressive driving from Jonny's place in Tooting to Aston Hill (didn't die! woo!) and then did 8 runs.
I must have improved a bit, because 6 of those were on the Black Run, and while the drop off in the woods still fazed me, everything else was fine. I even managed to get over the big root near the top - something that always used to pull me up short. Pathetic that it's taken 3 years to be able to do that, but it's nice to think that I have got better. Plus a lot less brakes on all the rest of it (until cocaine alley, at least). So maybe 6 months off the bike wasn't such a bad thing after all.
Jonny, meanwhile, thinks I look thin. To the point of laughing at me for having spindly little arms. So perhaps I should start fattening myself up again. Or take a set of photos to record spindliness over the year.
Back to Tooting via M40, huge plate of onion bhajia and curry, then back to Beckenham, and home to bed, via an episode of Peep Show. Woke up today feeling shattered. Ah well, good work.
27 press ups Friday, 28 Saturday. Should do 30 today.

Time passes. More culture, occasional dick jokes.

OK. We Need To Talk About Kevin doesn't really have a twist, as far as I'm concerned. It just gets worse and worse, but given you know it'll end bad, it's more a matter of magnitude, rather than a proper twist. Still think it's great though. Read Who Moved My Blackberry this weekend, which is pretty good for 90% of the time, but the promised Dantean twist never arrives, and in all honesty I firmly believe authors should never appear in their own books. Ah well. Have a new plan - let's see if we can introduce the term "creovative" to our own workplace.
Watched some more DVDs whilst enjoying doing nothing and not training. The Libertine is one of those rarities; a Johnny Depp vehicle where he doesn't look beautiful from start to finish. I doubt that it's because the presence of Johnny Vegas makes Depp's cheekbones pale in comparison. Probably more something to do with him getting the pox and his nose falling off in the closing scenes.
To begin with, it's a very difficult film to watch - all grey mud and misery. Plus the procession of actors from Coupling is a little distracting at times. I was almost giving up on the unremitting grimness of it, until a pivotal scene where a dwarf is wheeled onto stage aboard a ten foot wooden phallus. Terrific stuff.
Just watched The 40 Year Old Virgin. Was frankly amazed. Thought it would be the usual filth (American Pie 15, or somesuch) but it turned out to be simultaneously funny, clever and touching. A little overlong at two hours, perhaps, and with a few subplots unresolved (angry customer? scary boss?), but far superior to (say) 40 Nights, or whatever that pretty terrible sex-comedy from a few years back.
Beautiful words. Up there with Peep Show's "A man with socks but no pants looks scary. Like a chicken.":
"You know how I know you're gay?" "Cause you're gay, and you can tell who the gay people are?"
"The cadence of your voice just made my uterus drop out"
"I'm abstinent" "Absent?" "Abstinent"
Otherwise, so far so quiet. Got drunk on Friday night by accident - only a few pints, but this marathon-running body wasn't built for staying sober under such conditions. Wandered around London on Saturday after being thrashed 6-2, 6-0 at tennis, then went to Rachel's for a world cup barbecue. Drank six bottles of Kronenbourg on an empty stomach (smart, smart, smart) and was pretty broken by then, but carried on boozing with the others. Smoked a few cigarettes (why?) I've never smoked, apart from when I'm really very drunk. Played a version of charades I can't attempt to remember now, and passed out on the sofa about midnight - a good, fast drunken party. Woke up at 9 the next day - most sleep I've had for ages, helped Ben's friend Helen tidy the flat (thought she was beautiful, and she was on the rebound from something that sounded awful, but my usual tongue-tied shtick kicked in, so didn't attempt anything), and then staggered around drunkenly until the hangover kicked in properly, after which I was a wibbling wreck. Should have asked Helen for her number, but I doubt there was any chance there. Oh well. At least there's the internet to supply an almost limitless number of rejections. :)
So, what to achieve for the rest of the year? Let's make a list:

• Get a girlfriend
• Do 100 press ups
• Get 1st kyu
• Email ten insulting questions to Greg Minaar for Stopadoodledoo
• Get a girlfriend
• Start training for another marathon
• SSWC
• Work on Diet Croydon
• Figure out thesis for my MA
• Get Charred & Dangerous to Edinburgh and back
• GET A GIRLFRIEND

That'll do for now.