lazer-guided commentaries

I watched Moulin Rouge yesterday evening. I'd sum it up as visually spectacular, and slightly deficient in plot. It was interesting hearing Mr McGregor and Ms Kidman sing, and there were some clever cultural references. I also enjoyed the use of the Shakespearean idea of the play-within-the-play reflecting the play itself (and for a moment I felt that they'd managed to carry it further, to push the film out into the real world somehow... it was only a fleeting sensation though, and I can't remember why it struck me).

It's been an uneventful weekend otherwise. I put a new cover on my motorbike, replacing the one that was stolen; I visited the warehouse-sized ASDA supermarket at the end of the D6 bus route; and I read a little further through Bleak House. It's finally become cold enough that I've unlimbered the heavy artillery of winter clothing: the possum/merino gloves. The Met Office has taken back their earlier misprediction of snow; now they're mispredicting mere overcast days. Summer's just a fading memory.

According to Google, mikeb is the only person in the world who has written the exact phrase "meats, cheese, and inappropriate bread" into a webpage!

Update: As expected, mikeb once was the only person in the world who etc.

I went to Japan on the 3rd, for my friend Matthew's wedding. He's been in Japan for a long time now, I'm not sure how long except that it's more than five years.

I'd almost run out of holiday, so I could only spend 4 days there, returning by Monday evening, but managed to pack in a lot. Many of the old crowd from high school made it over [1], so we got to explore Tokyo and Yokohama together, which was brilliant. We also were finally able to meet Tim's girlfriend Elizabeth.

We had a day (Sunday) in Tokyo (Akihabara, Asakusa, Ginza), a day (Friday) in Yokohama (lunch at the restaurant where Matthew met his wife Yumi, a visit to Sankeien Gardens, a trip on the sea-ferry to see the city from the water, a walk through Yamashita Park and Chinatown, Tom Katsu for dinner), a day for Matthew and Yumi's wedding (the Saturday), and the remaining time basically for being drunken crazy gai-jin. We also had an afternoon in the less dodgy side of Shinjuku in Tokyo, the day we arrived.

Matt's wedding was amazing — at the Pan Pacific hotel in Yokohama, with a seven-course formal meal at the reception prepared by one of Japan's most famous chefs, and lots of formal speeches. After the reception we went up to the hotel bar for a few bottles of champagne and then on to an English-themed pub (!) in Yokohama to watch the South African team demolish the All Blacks; quite a strange context for a rugby match.

Toward the end of the day we had in Yokohama, we visited a crazy little darts bar where we got so freaked out at being the only foreigners there (and clearly we didn't know what the hell we were doing) that we left for a more traditional Japanese drinking establishment. After they kicked us out at closing time we went back to the hotel and drank Scotch and played Texas Hold'em poker until 3am, for small bits of paper we ripped out of a notebook and lemon sweets (each worth 10 scraps of paper).

The night of the wedding celebration we didn't get to bed until 6.30am, which would have been fine but for the fact hotel checkout was at 10am. Finally, on the Sunday evening, after exploring Tokyo all day, we had dinner with Matt and went on to a kind of exhibition space that was temporarily acting as a bar, where we met up with Yumi and a few of their friends and went on to a Karaoke Box place! They closed at 3am, we got to sleep around 4.30, and the next morning we had to get up at 7.45 to catch the train to the airport.

Three nights sleep deprivation combined with a massive drunk didn't help at all with feeling bright and chirpy on the train... I was still drunk when I woke up, and sobered up at about 10am while sitting on the Narita Express. Most unpleasant. The flight back was spent nursing my hangover and catching up on sleep, so my sleeping pattern has gone all out of whack what with that and the jetlag.

It was a fantastic holiday; with luck, I'll have copies of all the photos people took soon, so I'll be able to post a few here. Japan seems to be a really friendly country, and the atmosphere is like nowhere else I've been. I'm really looking forward to returning sometime soon.

[1] — namely Tim, Hadyn, Josh, Clayton and me

This (courtesy of IP) is revisited 50s gee-whiz techno-utopian optimism. In the future, we'll all be driving nuclear-powered cars! Holiday trips to the moon will be commonplace by 1973!

The problem is not so much with the predictions — although most will certainly appear laughable in hindsight — but with the irrelevance of the prediction game itself. "Tomorrow's robokitchen": who cares? This myopic obsession with artifacts ignores any wider context: the kinds of technological baubles discussed in the piece really have no bearing on what it is to be alive. An improvement in toasters does not translate into a change in human nature.

[Update:] Just found this slashdot comment which puts a different spin on essentially the same ideas. Another thought: the original article is so bad that it makes me wonder if it might be satirical in some way, rather than straight. I remain unimpressed.

I've just found the "export as web page" feature on iPhoto, so here is a collection of photos Blyss and I took when we visited Kew in May.

Our washing machine has started leaking. Naturally, it happened just as I wanted to use it on Saturday. I walked into the kitchen (they have the washer/dryer in the kitchens in England!) and the floor was inches deep in soapy water. Joy.

After mopping it up, I investigated the machine. It looks like one of the internal seals is going — there was no leakage from the front-loading door, just a trickle from the front left base corner of the machine. I moved it out from the wall to check the floor underneath it, and it was all dry except around the front left. I guess I'll call the landlord tomorrow.

Since I couldn't do my laundry at home, I arranged with Steve to use the machine at his flat, just a few hundred metres from my place. There was a barbecue at Steve's that afternoon I was already going to, so it worked out well.

The barbecue was good fun — the usual story of lots of food and beer. The whiskey came out around 10pm. Getting up this morning was a little challenging, but I soon recovered enough to go on to the welcome-back picnic for Josh that his partner Jen organised. (Josh has been in New York for four weeks.) I didn't stay too long, though, and fell asleep almost straight away when I got home.

For those of you not glued to the riveting London weather updates as they come in, it's been hot here. It was 28°C yesterday, and must have been about the same today, with clear skies all weekend. This is what summer is supposed to be like.

I found a photo from February, before the entire flat changed (except me, of course). Here it is:

Left to right, there's me, Brandon, Kellie, Amanda and Anabella.

I downloaded Skype this evening and had a play — it's amazing! It Just Works™! It's an internet telephony application: you plug in headphones and a microphone (or a headset) and you can talk to other skype users over the internet in real time, for free. I was very, very impressed with how easy it was to set up: a single download, type in your name, and voilá, you're online and ready to make calls. No registration, no complicated setup, very easy.

The really neat feature is that they have an interconnect to the old phone system too, so you can call real telephones. They're a pretty reasonably-priced telco, too: it costs two euro-cents (about 1.5p) per minute to call a New Zealand landline! They also do traditional text-based instant messaging, like Jabber or ICQ. I'm looking forward to using the €10 of call time I bought, but it'll have to be on the Windows machine at work since there's no Macintosh client — yet.

The other day a fund-raiser for mind approached me in the street and convinced me to start a regular donation of £10/month. It's probably a pretty good idea. I received a letter today acknowledging the gift. I feel quietly virtuous. (Not so quietly I'm not mentioning it here.) I'll maybe keep it up for six months or so. We'll see.

In other news, drinking-on-school-nights has been taking its toll. With Clayton's recent visit (drinks on Tue and Wed evening) and a couple of beers after work tonight it's been enough to disturb my sleeping patterns. I've had real trouble getting up the past couple of mornings. I'm looking forward to the weekend.

I've just realised that when I was learning about computers there were two separate things happening at the same time: the first, that I was learning to program in the abstract; and the second, that I was learning to program for UNIX. Programming in general is universally applicable - I can translate those skills to any programming environment without blinking - but the concrete UNIX skills it turns out don't generalize at all.

At work today I've been forced to learn about COM programming and Microsoft Outlook scripting. I know nothing about either topic, so I feel like I'm about 14 again, ordering "Teach yourself [whatever] in 24 hours" books from Amazon^[1] and learning a whole new bunch of facts. I've been cruising on the general-programming experience I have for the last several years - all of which is technique-based, not fact-based - and I've not stepped outside the UNIX domain for long enough that I had forgotten that there was a fact-based component to programming at all! It had faded into background awareness completely. "If you can't learn it by reading the manpages, it's not worth learning" presupposes an awful lot of knowledge about UNIX in general...

I feel like the abstract-programming skills I have have been refined ever since I was about 11 or 12, and that I will continue to hone those skills for the rest of my life. The fact-based programming skills, on the other hand, programming for a concrete system like UNIX or Microsoft applications, will likely need to be completely changed every 5 or 10 years.

This is great! I feel like I can look at programming with fresh eyes for a while. I can retain my sense of mastery of the abstract principles of programming, and enjoy the experience of being a novice exploring a new domain of knowledge at the same time.

[1] I really did almost order a teach-yourself-outlook-in-24-hours book - in the end I didn't, but instead bought a book by the same author...

I've just spent the afternoon doing household chores - cleaning the kitchen, doing a couple of loads of laundry - and also writing out about 20 CDs that I'd promised amynye some months ago. The photo is the scene out in our back garden at the moment. It's really hot, overcast sky notwithstanding.