Today I started my new job at Siemens Molecular Imaging. This is a bit of a strange step for me, changing from a company of 4.2 people (counting the part-timer) to one of 420,000. My body decided that the best way to prepare for this was to spend the day before in bed puking, so I started the day feeling pretty peaky, but innumerable cups of tea and a mushroom soup later I now feel much better.

I have mostly been doing orientation—on a project this size, I am unlikely to be coding before Summer. I have also decided to try to reacquire the Australian pronunciation of ‘project’ because Siemens have both projects managers and product managers, and I need to make them sound more different!

I’ve just been reading Kim Newman’s Professor Moriarty: the Hound of the d’Urbervilles and watching the Jason Bourne trilogy (the trilogy too cool to number the episodes).
I should probably take a break from stories whose protagonists are ruthless and skilled killers.

Hound of the d’Urbervilles takes as its premise the idea of Moriarty and Moran as a mirror image of Holmes and Watson and runs with it, fleshing out characters who only fleetingly appear in the canon but supposedly were active throughout, and taking pot shots at any number of nineteenth-century literary characters along the way. Great fun, but you probably would not want your servants reading it.

The Bourne trilogy has a few interesting side-notes. You get to see the evolution of office furniture from 17" CRTs to wall-mounted giant plasma panels, and a corresponding change in personal communication technology. You also see a depiction of American intelligence wildly out of control, gunning down British citizens on British soil without so much as a peep from MI6. But what really strains credulity is their network system administration skills—with five minutes’s notice they have a comms feed from across the world? Anyone who has tried to participate in a VOIP meeting will know that it takes 15 minutes minimum!

Yesterday was big travel day, setting out from Oxford by bus–train–bus–train to Guildford to see Rachel my sister, Andy her boyfriend and Alex my nephew in their new(ish) house. They have four fruit trees and three sheds! Then by car guided by Voice of Australia Tom-tom to Ramsgate to visit Josie (my Dad‘s widow) and James (their former baby boy, now a long-haired engineering student). Read most of a story to my nephew (though naturally he knows it off by heart and so was mostly ahead of me).

Andy and Rachel drove me back to Guildford though fog. Fog is the gamification of motorway driving: it reduces all the messy complexity of vehicles and scenery to a few numbers and red dots moving about in abstract patterns. Then just time to absorb some tea and crisps before getting the train–train–bus back to Oxford and home. I was pretty much ready to fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, but luckily I had the presence of mind to turn off my alarm first (since it was set to 6 a.m.).

Went to Jeremy and Tim’s Howlawe’en party last night. For once I was determined not to turn up without some attempt at a costume. I was inspired by an Enderman costume I saw on Reddit to make a flat-pack costume that I could strap to my bicycle’s luggage rack—essentially the cardboard for a cubical head and a dirt cube for me to hold, cut and folded but not taped together, plus a reel of sticky tape.



This works because characters in Minecraft are all made out of cubes! Endermen are all black, so this was another excuse to wear. I had to dothe cutting and decoration in a bit of a rush because by the time I got home it was after four and I wanted to get the costume ready in time to see the afternoon guests.



Afternoon guests included two babies dressed as a pumpkin and a zombie respectively. Assembling a flat-pack costume in one corner of a crowded room is a bit awkward, and I never did work out how to incorporate eye holes, but I was able to briefly demonstrate the costume and then set it aside to enjoy the pumpkin soup and convivial company.

Sorry for not replying to comments on my previous post on the subject. Too many social media. :-P

For those who are curious: The paper-based sacks are indeed, well, paper bags—big, multilayered brown-paper bags. I had a heap of hedge trimmings and weeds of the sort I do not want in my compost to dispose of and filled three of them before I got bored. When full they are about the volume of an old-fashioned bin. My approach to avoiding tearing the bags was to cut most of the bits up and bend the woody stems in on themselves and tie the resulting bundles up with ivy.

More importantly, they were indeed collected the next morning. I hate to think what I would do with three bags of twigs for 14 days and how I would go about keeping them out of the rain!

The old system forced me to do some of my gardening in instalments—since I could only dispose of one bag per week, then only one per fortnight when they changed collections to be fortnightly (all of the extra bags we bought over the years having blown away). Now I am still having to work in instalments, but in a different way: I can pile up as much garden stuff as I like, but I can’t store it, so it is best to only work in the garden the day before collection. Don’t know if this is going to be that much of a problem, though.

I have invented a new pudding: custard tart à la raspberry carnage, after the raspberries I bought at the farmers’ market got a bit battered on the way home.

Ingredients: custard tart with foil removed, raspberries, gooseberry organic yoghurt

Method: put in bowl in that order; serve immediately

Also, sampled the mid-afternoon movie-going experience with X-Men First Class, which was pretty cool. Being set in 1961 enabled a lot of the action and technology stuff to be just a but more classy than we are used to these days. The lack of relentless electric guitar chords helps a lot. Michael Fassbender’s turn as Erik Lehnsherr as international man of mystery is highly effective.

I tweeted: ‘People who’ve not been trained not to place punctuation not part of the quoted text outside the quotation marks. This irks American editors.’

Meaning that when someone not specially trained in the American style punctuates a sentence like

He said ‘elephant’, not ‘oliphant’.

will instinctively wrap the quotation marks around the text being quoted, leaving the comma and the full stop outside the quotation marks. American style manuals will tell you to instead write

He said “elephant,” not “oliphant.”

The idea is that it is more aesthetically pleasing to have an apparent gap between the closing quote and the text than between the text and the following punctuation. But only people who have been trained not to do it the logical way will do it the American way.

There tends to be a split in the US between (a) trained editors, who know it is more important to adhere to dogmatic rules than to be logical, (b) programming types, who think it is more beautiful to be logical, and (c) people who are unaware of the distinction, and type quotation marks where it seems sensible, if they use marks of quotation at all.

You already know this, of course: the Cowley Road Carnival will be held in South Park because their funding is all tied to the park. They are disappointed, I am disappointed, the councillors are doubtless rubbing their hands with smug glee as their plot to embrace, extend, and extinguish the late-1990s Reclaim the Streets events completes its final phase.

I propose that (Rapture permitting) next year’s event be renamed South Park Don’t Reclaim the Streets Buy Stuff Instead Festival.

(Don’t bother googling for Reclaim the Streets—their domain has been acquired by a squatter.)

Hats off to Cowley Road Works for keeping the street-closure element of the carnival alive as long as they did—I imagine it took a lot of lobbying in the face of a lot of resistance from the motorists who can’t contemplate spending a hot Sunday afternoon not driving their cars up and down Cowley Road. And the festival is still a good thing—it’s great to have an Oxford event that is about Oxford today, not the University and its history, and the diversity=fun message behind it is a good one. It is just sad to see it retreat from Cowley Road itself.

Edited to add the contents of the post. LiveJournal’s rich-text editor fucked up and deleted everything after the first line.

Went to MCM Expo for the first time yesterday. Here‘s a few things I learned.

(1) The journey

• Oxford Tube have a new format for 12-journey tickets, which is too large to fit in my wallet
• Oyster is over 30% cheaper than buyingTube tickets with cash
• Notting Hill Gate has a Paul Rhodes bread shop.
• The exhibition centre is officially called ExCeL which is the stupidest choice of name and choice of CaPiTaLiZaTiOn I have encountered in a while.

(2) The expo

• The queue to buy tickets takes over an hour; they had a hall the size of the expo’s hall filled with queuing people. I am told it is markedly better before say 11:00. Buying tickets in advance might help. As compensation you can admire the costumes on the other punters and (in my case) eat my Paul Rhodes sandwich.
• The Expo fits in one large room; the comics+animé village is in one small corner of it.
• This expo hosts the European Cosplay Awards, which means the cosplay element was probably higher than normal. The October edition is focussed more on memorabilia.
• The costumes in general are brilliant and well-executed.
• For those without the time to fabricate their own costumes, readymade Pikachu pyjamas (e.g., http://www.akinaiblog.com/product/540) were popular and look cute, even on quite burly men
• LiveJournal’s rich-text editor has suddenly lost the ability to create links
• The sheer density of the costuming makes a new normal—I felt a bit left out being in mufti

(3) Expos in general

• There are no social areas or seating except for a couple of small cafés—people generally sat on the ground in groups
• There did not seem to be much in the way of sketch swapping—no need to bring a sketchbook
• Handing out fliers or even displaying your own work is expressly and sternly forbidden, so I needn’t’ve weighted myself down with zines or Caption fliers
• Cosplay and the comics village aside, the event is strongly focussed on consumption and buying stuff, not creating your own