dogsolitude_v2

Borders, one of the 'Least Dumb' chains of bookstores, is having to get the administrators in.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article6934219.ece

You know Borders: it's the one which has a wide variety of different books on different topics, and stocks a few of each (though the size of the 'Crime Fiction' section is rather disproportionate). It's different to Waterstones, who only seem to stock the latest Celebutard bios and Harry Potter books, cramming shelf after shelf with the same damned volume over and over again.

Soon, the only bookshop left will be Waterstones. The works of literate and intelligent young authors smothered under a tide of books with titles like 'My Caffeine Hell' and 'Britain's 100 Greatest Bus Routes', novelisations of films, celebrity cookbooks, humour books ('Cats in Toilets III').

The Guardian recently had an article about waterstones: How Waterstones Killed Bookselling...

I really hope Borders doesn't go down the pan... From my own pov, I'm pretty confident that I can find books and other sources for things that I want to find out about from Amazon or other places, however most of the time I've picked up on new, interesting things from being in places like Borders, seeing a book about a subject I never even knew existed, thought 'hmmm, that's interesting', bought it and then gone on to find out more.

It's a process that has really enriched my life and kept me interested in things. Whereas a quick train ride to Cambridge will afford similar opportunities, I do sort of worry that the sheer diversity of human intellectual endeavour, knowledge and achievement should at least be partially represented in the selection of a good bookstore.

Learning is fun, stimulating and valuable. We can only really start learning things when you realise how much there is to know, and how little in the grand scheme of things we do know. The accidental discovery of something that 'looks interesting' and the indication that there is more to a subject than you think are both incredibly valuable experiences in danger of extinction at the hands of commercialism.

Oh well, maybe it's time for the Libraries of Great Britain to square their shoulders and sort themselves out...

INT. DICKFELDT'S OFFICE HQ - DAY

Dickfeldt is sitting behind a desk, in a massive chair. On his laps is a large, fluffy white cat. On the desk in front of him is a chessboard, complete with chessmen on it. A 'whoosh' is heard. BOND enters.


Bond winces at this hackneyed mispronunciation of his name



Dickfeldt holds both of his hands out. We're assuming that he has a piece of differing colour in each hand. Bond chooses a hand. He's chosen White.

Dickfeldt pauses. He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then stops again. He makes a small laugh, as if to say 'heh, just testing...', rotates the board 90 degrees and starts to rearrange the pieces, smiling at Bond as he does so. Finally, after a bit of awkward faffing...
They start moving pieces around.

They continue talking as they play on...



...He pauses for effect


...He moves a piece across the board and plonks it down somewhere in a decisive manner

For my own use primarily, but I thought I'd keep this post public in case you, the reader, find it useful. Just some definitions I found on Wikipedia:


Overchoice

"Offering more choices by itself seems like a positive development; in fact, however, it hides an underlying problem: faced with too many choices, consumers have trouble making optimal satisfying choices, and thus as a result can be indecisive, unhappy, and even refrain from making the choice (purchase) at all."

Continuous Partial Attention

"It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish." Continuous partial attention is about scanning continuously for opportunities across a network, not solely about optimizing one's time by multitasking.

Information Overload

An old one now: "an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information."

This last one made me think more about the the possibility that it could be a lack of structure and organisation around the miasma (a deliberate choice of word on my part: I know what it means :) of information we're subjected to that could be a problem.

I wasn't sure whether to applaud these young folk for their obvious multimedia DIY skills, or to weep hot salty tears of laughter and derison at a dreadful corporate exploitation exercise.

Here are some kids singing a song and dancing around a bit:



It's interesting to note the comically excessive use of the 'Gludo' preset from the free Triangle II VSTi, which can be found free on editions of Computer Music up and down the country. Or even here. It's been drenched in reverb.

If it's genuinely the work of a bunch of 17 year olds who have filmed themselves sharing a bottle of cider outside their folk's house, edited it using a cracked copy of Premiere and made a song using free software, then well done guys. I salute you! Nice one! It's the kind of thing I'd've loved to have done at that age (sadly my Atari ST wasn't really up to it).

If, however, it's the work of some record company who are too stingy to give the kids some decent equipment and hire a proper engineer to mix the song, then shame. For shame.

Well, it looks like I do have a job to go to on Monday (temp admin), just want to make sure I'm actually in an office this time before I sign off Jobseekers in case it borks again.

I also just had a rather bizarre telephone interview for a different post: these guys still use ASP.NET 1.1... O_o

I mean I'm perfectly happy to do that job, it sounds really interesting and all, but 1.1? I have no idea what horrors lurk in there... I have a funny feeling that it's going to be the programming equivalent of reading Chaucer.

This tickled me:


...though I think the best bit is at 7'20'', where he goes on about how we really oughtn't be scared etc.

Following on from yesterday's post about alcohol, hangovers and the resultant effect on mental state, I actually made a conscious decision this AM to investigate another phenomena which I think may be related.

After all the stress about thinking I had a job, not having one, and then probably having a different one yesterday I was a little frazzled. Fritz 11 beat me at chess, and so I retired to bed at about half ten, feeling very tired.

The guys upstairs obviously had some friends over to stay last night: there was a lot of cheery chat and giggling reverberating through the floorboards, which was actually quite nice. I drifted off, and at about half-past-eleven I was woken by a BANG! followed by a clatter. Cleary, Something That Must Not Be Dropped was Dropped on a floorboarded floor above my bedroom.

I lay awake unable to sleep, until I got that sort of sick, shaky feeling you get when your mind's awake, but your body has gone to sleep, won't move and has turned the thermostat down. It was a bit like being left in a nightclub after all the lights had been turned off and everyone had gone home. I lay like this for what seemed like hours, and thinking it must be about 3am I roused myself and went for a pee and got some aspirin. It was actually 12.02.

Still, I was very tired and drifted off.

I woke at 7am, and felt crappy. I was wide awake, and would usually have got up to watch the sun rise and listen to the birds (I like doing this), but this time I thought I'd try and stay in bed instead to make up a perceived sleep debt.

I know that sleeping in can make you feel really rough, and depressed, and I thought that this time I'd observe what went on in my mind and body with a detached air, and test this.

First, I hit the snooze and silenced Radio 3 for 16 mins (I have a variable snooze: hit the button once for 8 mins, twice for 16 mins etc). I drifted off, and started replaying one of last night's chess games against the computer. I also had my email open in another window and the TV on in the background. This was interestng, because I could actually see the chessboard (and it was 8x8, not some weird dream-version) the TV (had an endless loop of adverts on it for something) and an email window. Not only that but I could also sort of see bits of my bedroom behind it too, so maybey there was a kind of 'parallel processing' going on. Shortly this gave way to walking down a street with a lady in an Edwardian outfit, complete with hat, so by now I was dreaming again. This went on for quite a while, and I started to wonder when the alarm clock would go off again, or even if I had missed it.

After want seemed like a good half-hour, maybe an hour (it was difficult to tell) I woke myself up to see what the time was, and it was only about ten past 7.

I adjusted the alarm, and went back to sleep, except this time it was less comfortable. My mind was running through a number of 'ruminations' about my life, and I have to say that observing the neurotic nature of what was going on right at the back of my mind was quite alarming. I actually felt quite sorry for it.

Years ago, when I went to meditation classes I found that by meditating, one could slow down and eventually bring to a kind of stillness the conscious part of the mind. What was strange was that other 'bits' were still thinking, and it was possible to take a step back and 'listen to the chatter'. Doing that here revealed a depth of anxiety that I'd suspected was 'down there, somewhere', and brought it to the open. It was a bit like that bit in The Matrix Reloaded, where Neo's calmly talking to The Architect whilst at the same time hundreds of other Neos are laughing hysterically or shouting and swearing in the monitors in the background.

It was ever so strange, so I woke myself again, drank some water and tried to sleep again. By now it was about half-seven.

I won't bore you with the rest of the details, but I did come to a few conclusions based on my observations.

Firstly, time is weird. I'd never really experimented with this before, but a few minutes really can seem to stretch out to half an hour, an hour, maybe more.

Secondly, the longer I tried to stay in bed the worse I felt. I've reported this before, but really taking the time and trouble to observe the nature of my mental state when laying in bed has convinced me that it really isn't a good idea. There's a kind of tension there: the body is tired and wants to sleep, but if you do so too much the mind starts getting antsy, and not necessarily on a conscious level. It's a bit like a kid on Christmas morning getting upset because the parents want a lie in. Worse still, you're effectively trying to 'hide' from an issue. All the time you're in bed, you can't do an awful lot about whatever it is that's bothering you, and your mind knows it.

Thirdly, consider the effect of lying in combined with that of a hangover. It made me think: is it any wonder why so many people suffer from depression?

There's a balance to be struck somewhere. I don't believe in jumping out of bed at 5.30 am and having a cold shower, pulling on a nice clean hair shirt, going for a three mile run and them getting smug about it to everyone. However I think I'll be treating 'sleeping in' with some wariness in future, especially if I'm feeling agitated about something to begin with!

I'm going to look into this some more.

David Frost interviewing Chess GM Garry Kasparov last year:


It made for interesting, if brief viewing: the idea that Russia had a brief veneer of democracy before reverting to Oligarchy is something I find quite interesting. Though I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I were Russian.

You know I was supposed to starting a new job on Dec 1st?

It's been pulled. I now have no job to go to.

*bangs head against desk*

Over the weekend by Brother and his g/f cane to visit. We had dinner at take 5, and we were also joined by slick47 .

I don't drink much as a rule (one of the better habits I picked up from rhapsody9 ) and so I found it a bit tricky to keep up with everyone else and got rather sloshed. This affects the reasoning and verbal abilities, as well all know.

The following day I had a hangover. I noticed, however, that whereas some symptoms of a hangover are well documented (headache, nausea, shakiness etc), there were other more subtle effects which were more difficult to shake. I've noticed this 'supporting cast' of hangover symptoms before now, but have usually ignored them or attributed them to other causes.

The first one I noticed was a slight heightening of a sense of anxiety. Had I said or done anything stupid last night? There was also a little voice coming out with 'OMFG I'm wasting a whole day by being hungover! Something doesn't feel right...' It was a little like being stoned and getting that mild sense of fear that sometimes happens. I decided to investigate this a bit further, and found that a predisposition to anxiety can mean that such feelings will be exacerbated when hungover, or even arise as a result of low blood sugar.

Recognising that anxiety is a hangover symptom made me feel a lot better ('Phew! My life's fine,all's dandy...'), but it made me think that if one's unprepared for that effect, and carrying it around as an assumed part of their daily life-baggage, then it may lead to a distorted view of what's really going on. For example, if you go to work with a hangover, the anxiety caused by the hangover may be fallaciously attributed to workplace stress, making life seem somewhat worse than it actually is.

The other significant feeling that arose was a sense of detachment and unreality, which, like the anxiety, I recall from previous hangovers. There's a sense of 'floating on the surface' and of not being properly engaged with what's going on. It's as if you're just passing through, and real engagement with the world requires a dreadful effort of will.

The general lack of energy and lethargy, coupled with a sort of grouchiness, can exacerbate these symptoms. If you're feeling lethargic it's more difficult to shake the symptoms off, get up and sort your life out. Being a bit snappy towards others will lead to predictable results, and if you're already feeling anxious/mildly paranoid then snapping at someone won't help much!

I fell asleep quite early last night, and slept like a log, so I'm back to normal now. Got loads to do, so I'd better get on with it!

Here's a link to C4's Dispatches programme, in which Old Oborne investigates the role and influence of the Pro-Israeli lobby group on our politics and media:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches

Basically, it boils down to the following:

1 - If you're an MP, and Pro-Israeli, you get donations from various members of various pro-Israeli groups. These donations are often in the tens of thousands.

2 - If, like William Hague, you suggest that maybe Israel's being a bit heavy handed and using disproportionate force against Hamas, the donations stop.

3 - If you question Israeli Government Policy on a forum or discussion board, you're branded a Nazi or Anti-Semite.

4 - If you write an article in the Guardian about conditions in Gaza (which one Rabbi describes as being akin to an Apartheid state imposed by Israel on Palestinians), you get a threatening visit. Worse, if you question the Israeli nuclear weapons programme, you're compared to a Nazi propogandist.

5 - If you're Jewish, and (like many Jews) not happy with the behaviour of the Israeli Government, you're branded a 'self-hating Jew' (presumably because the term 'Anti Semite' doesn't fit.

So basically, unless you go along with whatever the Israeli Gov want, you get trouble. If you play nice, they (the lobbyists) give you money.

When put this way, it's really no different to any other lobbying, however what I find distasteful is the way that questioning the Zionist aims of the Israeli Governmnet is persistently conflated with Anti-Semetism, and the way that the spectre of the Holocaust and Nazism is brought up as an emotional baseball-bat-with-nail-in-it.

For some reason the whole thing kept putting me in mind of The Church of Scientology.

WPF

I love Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It is a lovely way of using markup to make buttons and things on a piece of software.

Not so sure about the 'Dispatch' thingy though.

Employment

Hopefully find out about possible interview for C# job tomoz. Someone I know in another agency is going to pester Soup on my behalf.

Chess

To keep myself in programming practise I've been making a small chess program (well, a GUI for one anyway). I'm aiming for something reasonably modular, so you can choose which engine to use (say Shredder, Rybka or something). These will beat the utter living crap out of anything I could program.

It started off as a VB.Net 'Black Project' at my last workplace, and I managed to convert it to C# without too much hassle.

I got it to start up the engine in a separate process thread, and getting the output asynchronously was a bit of a pain until I actually sat down and drew a flowchart.

I also want something where I can rake through old annotated PGN files. And something that looks good.

The Aesthetics of Chess

It's no wonder nobody plays the bl00dy game any more. I was looking at other chess programs, and their all utterly fugly. Likewise the 'Chess' magazine that you can find in Borders. If you like shooting things with guns, or driving fluorescent vehicles through mud, or playing games on the PS3, or getting married, your magazines look pretty good. They have bright colours, and a general sense that someone actually decided to design it.

Not so Chess magazine, where someone just dumps a load of Arial Black copy on top of a badly-balanced colour photo.

This is a real shame, especially when you thing about how great a well-crafted Staunton chess set looks, and the generally satisfying nature of an 8x8 chequerboard.

Boots

I also found another 'tide me over' job that will give me something to do in case the C# positions don't materialise: one that involves building PCs. Apparently I'll need steel toe-capped boots for this.

Job Search

I was contacted by Cooper Lomaz with details of three, yes three, ideal positions! Two involving C#.Net web development, one involving Flash.

Music

None really. Fiddled around with Reaktor a bit. I love this piece of kit, it's like having a synth lab :)

Photography

Think I'll wander down by the river at some point. Not used the old camera in a while...

Europe

I'm currently trying to find out about how the EU works, and the constitutional relationship between the EU Commission, EU Parliament and EU Council. I'm also (vainly) trying to find an unbiased account of the pros and cons of EU membership and the various options available. Both sides, pro and skeptic, appear to be getting increasingly irrational and the nearest thing to any kind of debate we have seems to run along these lines (culled from various forum posts and articles):


Pro: Like ZOMFG, if you're anti EU you're just like some Little Englander Nazi type clinging to an outmoded concept of nation states. Europe is The Future, like in Star Trek where they have one World Government, and it's the way things are going, and if we don't go for it we'll be left behind, we need Europe to compete with China, India and the US, we're not a world power any more...

Anti: Like ZOMFG, we'll lose our identity, they just want to take over, fought in three world wars, Old Blighty,I love the Pound, pints and feet and inches, Brussels is taking over, traitors selling off our sovereignty...


The above are terrible caricatures of the two main points of view that appear to be surfacing, but neither succinctly puts a logical case one way or the other.

Simply saying that something is 'the future' or the 'way forward' doesn't make it so unless there's a case for it that involves substantial benefit to us all, and general paranoia on the part of the skeptics isn't exactly helpful either. I'm more concerned with democratic accountability, transparency and civil liberties, as well as the general stability of the proposed system. I noted that a weak pound will assist our exports (well, what we have of them) and may help our recovery from the recession, for example. Would having had a stronger Euro have harmed our chances in that respect? I suspect so, but would this have been a price worth paying for deeper involvement in a stable economic and political environment?

Questions, questions...

Guy Fawkes' Night was always one of my favourite times of year when I was young. It marked the end of the Autumny bit, and the delicious, smoky, foggy and dark run-up to my Birthday, and thence Christmas.

Over the last couple of years I use it as a time to reflect on political matters. I became 'politicised' when the Government announced the introduction of Identity Cards (though I suspect my opposition to the Iraq War may also have had a hand in that process), and when engaging in discussions about the issue I became concerned at the sheer number of people who hadn't realised that the Government are supposed to work for us.

They are not 'the powers that be', they are fallible and imperfect people like you and I, and are subject to the same temptations regarding power and wealth that the rest of us are.

They are there, sitting in the Commons, because we put them there.

They are not 'in power', they are 'in office'. It is their job to ensure the smooth running of the country, not to 'rule' us.

Just as we have quality control in the workplace, and just as our managers scrutinise our work, we must exercise a similar diligence in matters of politics, and the way our country is run.

Your MP works for you. You can find out what he or she has been doing and contact them using various websites such as http://www.writetothem.com/ and http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

We need change in our society and we must learn from the lesson of North America: that voting someone in on a programme of 'change' won't necessarily work in our favour, if it works at all.

Any monkey can promise 'change'! The phrase is meaningless. 'Change' can mean from bad to worse. 'Change' can mean a simple change of the faces on the Commons benches. I wouldn't spend £300 on the latest iConsumerDevice from Apple purely on the basis that it would 'make changes' in my life; I'd want to know precisely what it was going to do and how it was going to benefit me.

Real change, substantial, long lasting change comes from the likes of you and I. We have to drive it. If each of us has a clear vision of the kind of society we'd like to live in, we can start to consider the machinations of Parliament and our pseudo-democracy against this. We can give our support to those who are making moves in the directions that are agreeable to our personal vision, and oppose those who would vex its attainment.

We can also join pressure groups that campaign on issues that are important to us. They may be environmental issues, welfare issues, issues of freedom and liberty. Find the stuff you believe in, push for your voice to be heard.

The issue of the Lisbon Treaty has shown how ill-informed many of us are about how the relationship between ourselves and those who make the laws that govern our lives is changing. Most of us don't know what the treaty entails, and most debate about the issue seems to simply involve the exchange if insults. The issue of MPs Expenses demonstrates the human fallability of those who make the laws, and the ongoing tale of surveillance in the UK shows how deeply entrenched a mistrust of the public is ingrained in those who make up the State.

The State in the UK has overstepped the mark in terms of hubris and arrogance. We're kept in the dark, and denied the opportunity to vote on issues of constitutional importance because we're not deemed well-informed enough to have an educated view on the matter. We can't be trusted to look after our own children without being vetted by The State, and a suffocating morass of Anti-Terror legislation combined with unprecedented levels of Surveillance, Health and Safety Enforcement, petty bureaucracy and Political Correctness is slowly starting to paralyse us into a kind of dazed, learned helplessness whilst those in office consolidate their positions and steamroller through whatever the damned hell they feel like.

It's like a much-loved old farm dog developing a kind of senile neuroses. It's fat, greedy, crapping on everything, thinks the neighbour is its master, dominates our lives, attacks the sheep and hugely oversensitive to any slight.

It's time for us to take it on one last walk.

Here's a link to the chillingly amusing 'Unspoken Constitution' of the UK:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/unspoken_constitution.pdf

Read it and weep...

Does anyone remember V? That old series about aliens who come to Earth looking all nice with their shiny red uniforms, and before you can say David Icke (The Legend) they're revealed to be reptiloids with a taste for mammals?

It's been re-imagined, and someone's shoved the first episode on Youtube in five bits:

1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLLgMfwRSHI
2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89iPOAxYQ74
3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm4BV6cw9os
4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_v5M-Y6Hjo
5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZg7lfuhXk

If you're lucky they may still be there when you have a look.

One of the things I love about US shows and films with huge flying saucers is that they always remember that London gets invaded too. There's always a shot of a big ship hovering over the Palace of Westminster whilst a big red bus drives past. Always gives me a little glow, that does. :)

Keep your heating bills under control this winter!

Work out how much your heating costs per hour to run (see entry from last week to find out how I did it - your method will be a bit different depending on your tariff)

Clean out an empty Kenco jar.

Make a label saying 'Fascist Corporate Bastard Fat Cat Gas Fund' and stick it on said jar.

Put labelled jar next to heating timer thingy.

Now all you have to do is remember to put 50p in the jar every time you put the heating on for an hour.

Don't spend the money on booze or anything, use it towards your Gas Bill.

I'm back from my travels. I was met at the station by the beautiful sight of Ms rhapsody9 waiting for me on a bench.

We had Domino's Pizza last night (too tired to cook), and I had my usual: vegetarian supreme with added jalapenos and pineapple.

This am I awoke after uneasy dreams about having a job with a smoothy company, where I drove a green taxi round the place selling smoothies to people on the way. A crappy job, but a job nonetheless with a regular, predictable income.

I awoke feeling very nervous and rather agitated (in fact I had been all night). I felt stressed and depressed. I had that nervous feeling in my tummy, a sensation of dread in my gut...

Then, upon inspection, I realised it was my body's natural reaction to jalapenos and felt much better as a result. This got me thinking about how sometimes we can easily misread what our body's trying to tell us. For me, whenever I eat jalapenos, I get an indentical sensation to that of stress or 'exam time' the following day.

I *am* rather concerned about the job situation (it would be silly not to be), but it's not like I've never been here before. Try as I might, I can't actually make myself stressed about it: whenever I think about it all I see is a 'to do' list involving CVs, agencies and job adverts.

Once I'd realised that I was just dealing with a natural bodily thing instead of a more reactive issue, I was able to sort myself out a bit. I'm off into the city now to sign up with a couple of other agencies and look for some work.

Additionally I'm reading a truly excellent book called 'Coding Complete', lent to my by Mr witz66 . It's about best practices in programming, and as I'm very keen on keeping things elegant, simple and easy to maintain, this book is invaluable.

I also have a website to design for my bro.

I have some money. Not much, but enough to keep me happy.

It is Autumn, and there will be a bonfire night somewhere. I love bonfire night :) Mmm... Firey...

Happy Halloween. Yeah, Samhain, old pagan thing etc. etc. etc. We all know the drill on that one by now I think, so I won't repeat anything that's already been flying around about the origins of this particular confection-fest.

I'm in Surrehr in my bro's flat, drinking some wine from the Isle of Wight*, listening to Muse and fiddling about with jQuery.

Himself has gone off to a party in Windsor Great Park, and got himself lost looking for it. In the dark, on Halloween. I texted him back to tell him to look out for the ghost of Herne the Hunter.

*Tip #1: don't drink a wine if you recognise any font used on the label
*Tip #2: ...especially if it's Comic Sans
*Tip #3: persevere with white wine that tastes like pencils, because after half a bottle it will improve (probably)