The Lair

I’ve alluded several times before to how large a job can feel when it’s viewed from the outside. I tend to do this a lot. So, this weekend - I stayed at home (a flu break of sorts). That provided enough impetus for a bit of housecleaning.

I finally stopped sitting on sundry papers submitted and pieces of research scribbled and half-done over the years; started on the great merge of 2007. Essentially putting everything into some sort of cohesion and texifying the stuff that I had written in Word and other weird formats ages ago. Because if I don’t fricking submit by summer, I’m going to be missing out.

The theory is that there are many many different forms of writing. The dribble on this blog notwithstanding, I flatter myself that I am a reasonably coherent academic writer. I suck at the informal stuff and even the formal writer-writer stuff. But I can generally put down my reasoning on a page of text - which is basically what academic writing requires. Unfortunately, my style appears to have evolved (a kind word, that) and things I wrote (and were even accepted) ages ago seem horribly contorted and awful now.

Must.resist.temptation.to.rewrite.reams.of.old.material. Just not worth it. But even with that said, it’s going to be sad to have to ruthlessly trim down my 100+ page count at present into a more realistic and much much smaller number. Boo.

Yeah and random bugs with my chosen Tex environment are annoying too. There is too much voodoo in a standard MikTex environment for my comfort. I also made the (possibly fatal) error of upgrading from my venerable (and working!) 2.4 to the not-so-new 2.5. Forgetting the old adage of “If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it” and promptly breaking everything. Gah.

Oh and over the weekend, Chelsea won the match, but Arsenal threw the better punches. Encouraging from Arsenal, but not enough. Also, they weren’t in Fight Club but apparently a few of their team forgot that. Now if only the Carling cup were being awarded for being a better team of amateur pugilists, Arsenal would have been all over it like a liquored up dirty flyweight over the canvas. As it was - two red cards. And to conclude on a footy note, amazing how much better the Chelsea back four look when Terry is there. Diaby clearly failed at the kick to the head ploy.

And I updated this post to remind myself (it was only Saturday! It seems so long ago!!) that Italy sliced and diced the Scots in the Six Nations and the French grandslam hopes are still alive. Barely. They have a couple of tough games to go, though.

Much (perhaps overly so) has been made of comment moderation, flaming and other aspects of administering online fora recently. Obviously, this is a great time for me to weigh in and reduce the signal to noise ratio even further.

See, I deal with more than just weird comments on my own site, I also need to play guardian of truth and light (such as it is) for other people’s entries via Ach. With varying results.

Some stats first. Since the last time, there has been a bit of an explosion in tagging.

(cold hard numbers and other stuff)

Has my fifteen minutes started? Already? I’m not prepared! Stop the clocks!!

I was checking my mail (not e-mail, but the paper, envelope, Royal Mail variety) this morning and I discovered a thick letter sent from somewhere in the States in my pigeon hole. Now, mail from America isn’t exactly the novelty that it used to be at one point - but this letter was sufficiently thick and from an unknown address that my curiosity was aroused. Joisey? I don’t know of any one in Joisey.

With a bit of trepidation, I opened up the letter and was greeted with several sheets of official forms and a cover letter on an expensive double sheet of paper.

Dear [Senhor Drac],
Congratulations!
It is my great pleasure to inform you that you have been chosen as a candidate for inclusion in the upcoming 10th Anniversary Edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering®

As it happens, I was simultaneously attempting to play Literati with Chickenbutt and eat a few sammiches. And err.. trying to read this mysterious letter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my next bite of delicious roast ham sammich went the wrong way as I choked.

[13:46] drac: I got this letter from somewhere in the US asking for bio data? WTF?
[13:46] chickenbutt: huh?
[13:46] chickenbutt: who sent it?
[13:46] chickenbutt: is it a company or some silly idiot
[13:47] drac: AHAHAHAHAHAHA
[13:47] drac: OMGWTF
[13:47] drac: OMG OMG OMFG (restrained and unfazed as always, that’s me)
[13:47] chickenbutt: what?
[13:48] chickenbutt: tell!!!

Completely unlike the TARDIS, for example.

Any problem or knotty little puzzle abandoned assumes monstrous proportions when I return to it after a few weeks. Consider that for the past 10 days or so, I’ve been wrestling with FrameNet, a very nifty but rather complex lexical resource. It’s important for any number of reasons that I complete this technical arm wrestle and making this glorified dictionary work for me - not the least being that I’m supposed to be in writeup mode now and I still have lots of loose ends to tie up.

Unfortunately, the Framenet stuff is inter-related with some other work that I did almost an year ago. Around March last year, I took an unofficial sabbatical of sorts from this whole research gig and did a bit of commercial work for ye olde filthy lucre. It worked out quite well, on the whole - but all of the experiments I carefully crafted last year look like Klingon crossed with Mumbo-Jumbo at this point.

Most emphatically not of the good, since it’s understood that the person who discovered some novel process is generally supposed to be capable of explaining it. I can’t for the life of me remember the details of my (supposedly) novel process any more, let alone explain it.

This whole “out of sight, out of mind makes problems grow larger” theory has another anecdote. I somewhat foolhardily undertook an ambitious job for Habari - the whole dbdelta business. I had it covered, almost - till I had to take a hasty rain check and dive into the FrameNet stuff. Now that stuff looks indecipherable too. Ugh.

And a final sporting note - I tuned in late to watch Bolton vs Arsenal last night. Adebayor had already scored the first goal. Watched the game inbetween channel surfing and then settled down to watch it to a finish just before Adebayor blew a chance at an open goal by hitting the side post. A couple of minutes later, Bolton scored an equalizer.

What did I do? What any true fan would do, of course. Clearly, Arsenal had been doing great without my viewership and I was jinxing them. So I promptly changed the channel and pretended the match didn’t exist.

It worked too. Although I only found out about it in the news later on that night.

My landlord is quite enthusiastic about embracing technology. On the face of it, he’s completely atypical of your everyday geek - but those dusty jeans and Harley Davidson leather jackets actually disguise someone who is pretty technically adept, but very self deprecating about his undoubted abilities.

Recently, he got himself one of those fancy new fangled iPods.

Only, the iPod is notoriously finicky about the formats of video that it will play - so he needed to sit down and do a conversion job from his existing archives. He asked me what I would use and I had no hesitation in pointing out VLC. Free, plays practically anything and the transcode wizard will convert into different formats as well. Unfortunately, VLC isn’t pretty. Yeah, it does the job but he didn’t like it. So he actually went shopping and bought two pieces of software (not one, two) that he liked. Why did he buy it? Because “I just liked the look of it and I knew I’d enjoy working with that software“. Aside, it was Xilisoft Video Convertor and DVD Ripper.

Anecdotal, perhaps - but yet another reminder of how much looks actually matter. Functionality means very little - and people are actually prepared to pay money even when free alternatives exist. Granted, the prices were low enough that it counted about as much as getting dinner delivered from the nearest indian takeout but even so …

It seems like England won. Will it make up for the mauling they suffered in the Ashes? Maybe not. It’s still nice to see that the frantic (and necessary) tinkering has paid off somewhat. Who’da thunk that Plunkett would become a potent strike bowler? I certainly didn’t see that one coming.

And in more pick-me-up news, it seems that Viagra will be available over the counter. From Valentine’s Day. If the symbolism escaped anyone, please do go to your local A&E and have that nasty pointy stick poking out of your eye attended to. And via the same source, I see that Glaswegian smokers got a head start. That must have made for some awkward consultations in Scotland, eh? “It’s been great, doctor. I’ve had just as many fags and lots more wood after the treatment. Isn’t that marvellous?” [I’m channelling Frankie Boyle here]

And I’m highly taken with UsedToBeCool - only slightly less weird than one of my longtime favourites, Aphex Twin. I discovered UsedToBeCool via Lady Luck - and I somewhat shamefacedly confess that this was completely contrary to my preconceived notions and thus an extremely unlikely (or so I thought) source of decent DnB. Not one of those bandwagon humping indie chicks? Awesome. Now to see if UTBC’s second album will be as good as their first.

or not.

It’s not often that people living in Yorkshire can gloat about good weather but today is one of those days. While the southern half of the country closes schools and advises people to stay indoors; York is enjoying a pleasantly balmy (ok, not really) -2c low. And no snow. Plenty of ice on the roads though, which sucks.

And I gave up watching last night shortly before Spain scored the only goal of the game against England. Yeah, injuries and missing players but whatever. And interestingly, MacLaren got booed by the crowd when the game finished. Again. How many matches has he been in charge now? 5? Not having much of a honeymoon period as a manager, is he?

And some compelling TV - a video doing the rounds recently - American A-10s versus UK Scimitars in a friendly fire incident. The subtitled text pretty much says it all. War is hell.

I have no idea why, but people (usually undergrads) occasionally ask me for project advice. Specifically, what do I think they should do for their final year project and so on. Like so many things in life, that’s pretty much a no-win situation. I find it insanely difficult to propose a project idea that doesn’t suck on some level to the person who is going to do the project.

So I cop out tamely and always end up asking them a counter question: “Well, what do you like to do?“. Inevitably, there is a lot of hemming and hawing or an immediate response of “I like pretty much anything, just give me a project idea“. Occasionally accompanied by a “OMG deadline tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if it sucks: if I don’t give in a proposal, I fail“.

Someone (was it you, Ed?) proposed that you should do stuff for your project that you like, but don’t absolutely love. You need to be able to like the project topic enough to stick with it when the inevitable teething problems occur. At the same time, perhaps you shouldn’t do stuff that you passionately love. Not so sure about this, but the line of reasoning is that you will end up hating the drudgery of a project and that means you will like what you’re doing a little bit less. Why get to the point where you’d treat a former favourite subject area like a dirty shirt? No reason at all.

(and it gets really tricky now)

So all in all, it’s shaping up to be a decent weekend. Went to the Derry last night after what seemed like ages (about an year, actually). The Derry or Deramore Arms is really the old man’s pub in the village. At least it has that (somewhat justified) reputation. Oh, there were few grumpy old men but there were also lots of kids who didn’t look much more than uh … 16 at the most. No, they were probably older, I’m a bit rubbish at guessing ages.

And they had pheasant on the menu! I wonder if Lord Deramore’s fabled hunting grounds contributed to the day’s special.

Today, England kick off their Six Nations campaign as do Les Bleus. Tomorrow, it’s the Super Bowl in Miami and probably the best fixture of the Six Nations opening weekend (Ireland vs Wales). I have laid on a stock of vittles and potables and intend to spend the rest of the weekend in cow mode - munching on crisps and peanuts while watching the TV with glazed eyes.

And I played Wii sports for like the first time ever and we wants that console, my precioussss. Yes, we does. The Wii belongs to my supervisor, who is a bit of a gadget freak. In what seems like the intro to a bad bad joke; a Chilean, Nepali, Greek and Sri Lankan went to a house close upon midnight last night to shut themselves up in a room and wave around a piece of plastic frantically while watching a TV. Yes, there was beer involved (and oh my, the Derry stocks excellent scrumpy. Win!) but I don’t think it was a factor.

To be brutally honest, I think I really want the console because I play better snooker, tennis and golf than I ever would in real life. There are also a few comedy shots of my supervisor playing the boxing game; which involves two controllers being waved around frantically in the air in a simulation of landing punches on the opponent.

I uh… only need the university to overpay me once again (and obviously, tell me to keep the excess cash) and I should be able to afford a Wii easily. Somehow I’m not really hopeful about that happening, but hey.

This is related to a question I was asked earlier - am I the sole author of the (snarky and sometimes hilarious) tags on Achcharu? If that’s all you wanted to know, then the answer is no. But since I’m not content with a simple answer, a bit of history is necessary. Actually, no. The history lesson isn’t necessary but I’ve been busy in the real world and a series of digressions will serve as content for today.

When I started on Achcharu, I just needed three things from it. Those goals are essentially unchanged today so it’s worth repeating.

1. I wanted to have blog entries presented in a manner conducive to quick scanning
2. I wanted to have some collaborative input on the stories and some commentary.
3. I wanted meta-aggregation (more on this later)

(but wait! there’s more)