Partial Pressures

John Peel signs off.

*sigh!*

The irony is, I bet he would have loved to talk about this on Home Truths.

So long.

Happy birthday, Teletext

Teletext - or at least CEEFAX - is thirty years old today.

I remember the first time I saw it, in a side exhibit in the Science Museum in London, in the room housing GB2SM, the demonstration amateur radio station: a television permanently tuned to BBC1, and a simple keypad. It was slow and clunky, but you could tell straight away it was something special. (Remember, this was 20 years before more than a handful of people had heard about "the Internet".)

The format has always been simple. Numbered pages, 24 lines of 40 characters in eight colours, and simple block graphics. The service was basic in those days, just news headlines, TV listings, and a few other odds and ends like the current Top 40 pop charts. There was one other crucial ingredient: the ability to overlay text on a screen as subtitles.

It took a while to catch on, but it's nigh-on ubiquitous these days, and even Luddites don't think twice about reaching for the remote to see what's coming up next - or to put on the subtitles so they can follow the programme they were watching while listening to whoever's on the phone. The statistics say that something like a third of the UK's population looks at Teletext sometime during the week.

One of the most interesting things I've noticed about CEEFAX and its commercial equivalents (Oracle, ITV Teletext, 4-Tel) is the effect on visting USAnians. "I never knew this was possible," one said, "How come we don't have anything like it. You say everyone here has it...?"

(Obligatory Canadian content. Canadians nearly had something like it: Telidon, a second-generation system with vastly improved graphics. Unfortunately, it was a case of wrong place at the wrong time, and it shut down in 1985. Telidon's graphics capabilities live on, though -- if indirectly -- in the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) standard for the WWW.

Happy Birthday, Late Junction

Late Junction is five years old today.

How to describe it? Just try to imagine: a gipsy dance on cimbalom and violin, followed by Georgian (the south of Russia one) choral singing with it's scrunchy modes and harmonies, then Eno & Fripp, Arvo Paert... stir in Kristin Hersh, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Neil Young, and wash it all down with an Irish fiddler's lament.

And that's just from one programme.

Amazing. Well done, and keep up the good work.

Oh no, not again

Richard Feynman told a story of how he agreed to give a lecture, for which there was some remuneration. He agreed somewhat reluctantly, fearing a mass of paperwork, but eventually stipulated that he would only sign his name N times (N was twelve, I think), including the endorsement on the cheque. His host laughed: of course, that would be easy.

There was, of course, all kinds of paperwork and bureaucracy, and what had started as a laugh rapidly turned to nervous twitching as the number of signatures crept past three, to six, to nine... ten...

I felt a bit like that today. Counting the forms I'd already filled in (most with the same details, over and over), I think it got very close to Feynman's limit.

There's a Business Opportunity there for someone...

Gone, but not forgotten

I don't mean to seem picky, but really.

The mail this morning included a large envelope from my former employer. Gosh, that sounds funny when I say it! It's announcing a new scheme they've cooked up, a new variation on the theme of Employee Benefit.

It's nice of them to think of me, but really... Wasn't anyone paying attention when I handed in my notice, all those weeks ago? And will they be as quick with the tax certificates?

Last day

The day started like any other.

The ear worm for the day was, of all things, Abba's The day before you came. (When I find out who picks these tunes, there's going to be strong words said. Ho yus.) I couldn't fail to notice the irony...

At eleven o'clock, the official send-off. Someone had arranged for juice, fruit, and pastries, which was a lovely gesture in these times of tight budgets. The card, the gifts, the good wishes and embarrassing speeches... thanks, folks.

I probably should have sent out my farewell email a few days before I left, rather than a couple of hours. Sorry.

The old army-brat reflexes are, I've discovered, still there beneath the surface. Weaken the ties, ease the roots loose... I wonder if modern army brats think the same way, in a world of email, text messages, chat, and blogs. There's an interesting little study for someone.

And anyway, while logically my world is about to change, physically I'm barely moving. So not good-bye, then... au revoir, auf wiedersehen, hasta la vista...

See ya. :)

Last week

Tomorrow is my last day at my current job.

No, really. I'm leaving. After seventeen years, I'm moving on.

Seventeen years! That's three times longer than I lived... well, anywhere, really.

I've been working at the "R" end of R&D for a large multinational company. Which one probably isn't as important as you might think. It's been great, for the most part, but in the last couple of years, it's clear that neither it nor I are the same as we were all that time ago. I've been there, and I've done that, and it's time to move on.

I spent most of today packing bits and pieces into boxes. All those stacks of papers and books that were stashed around my desk distilled down into eight or nine small cardboard boxes... ironically, the sort that originally held thousand-sheets of office paper or books from Amazon. I thought this would be a pig of a job, but actually, it's been good.

Every now and then, someone has come up to me and said, "I hear you're going". And then some say they're sorry, while others say that's great. And some just half sigh and look into the distance a moment before we launch into a chat about why and where and what next and when. (For those who don't know, it'll become clear in a couple of days.)

The great thing is that everyone -- so far-- thinks I'm doing the right thing, whatever angle they're seeing it from. That's reassuring. And the offers of help (down the road) and bits of advice and opinions are all great.

Tomorrow's going to be an interesting day.

Sniff and scratch

Every so often, you see a couple of things turn up close together that look like a match made in heaven.

First, there's this little treat from debris.com:

Thursday afternoon the indoor temperature hit 90°, hot enough to melt the fatbucket. The heat must have advanced the mystery decay; by Thursday night the odor had aquired an unpleasant piquancy: an edge of sewer scent to accompany the rottenness. I began to search, nose first.

I sniffed under the sink (dank vinyl floor scrap, cleaning products in plastic bottles). I sniffed the refrigerator (fresh produce). I sniffed the baking cabinet (dusty grains). I sniffed the tea and spice cabinet (a wild mix of dried, crushed plant parts). Desperate, I started to sniff the silverware drawer when I realized what the source of the bad smell must be.

Oh yeah! That pan of discarded sourdough starter that's been sitting on the counter for 30 days!

(and to think I have to thank debris.com for putting me on to Peter Reinhart, whose books on breadmaking are almost as good as the bread that ensues from reading them...)

Anyway, what better partner for over-ripe sourdough starter than this? After all, they'll be looking to widen the range of, um, recordings...

Testing from The Journal

For a few years, on and off, I've been using DavidRM's TheJournal as an electronic diary. It's pretty good, and probably the least intrusive and most natural program of its type I've used.

Not that that's saying much. It's not the software's fault. It's just that I've never been that good at keeping a journal or diary going.

So why, you might ask, am I keeping a blog? Well, maybe this time it'll be different :)

Anyway, the point of this exercise is to test The Journal's blog posting abilities. It should be able to post to TypePad. Let's see if it works.

Well, apparently it does... Cool. Although, it would be nice if it prompted for a title instead of guessing.

Under the hammer

The August Bank Holiday Monday, day eight, and crunch time. It's auction day, with proceeds divided between the carvers and Tree Aid.

It's nerve-wracking at the best of times. In a good year, pieces can fetch several thousand pounds, which is great news for both carvers and charity. 2000 was a pretty good year, since everyone was flush with Millenium projects. A couple of years later, and things seemed much tighter.

What would it be this year?

Well, for a start, it wouldn't be good if the pieces weren't actually finished and more or less in place.

The gremlins in the phoenix put up a struggle, aided and abetted by gravity, but in the end they gave up, and the beast settled down into a somewhat flat but still striking poisition. Anthony finished his piece, and after some furious sweeping, the Cat tractor carried the last half-tonne bags of sawdust and offcuts away like giant kittens.

In the end, it wasn't a great year for the auction. Who knows what attracts the bidders' fancy? Still, 25 grand in takings isn't so bad, even after expenses.