Spurred on by the forthcoming adaptation on ITV, I’ve finally got round to reading Christopher Brookmyre’s first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning

Wow.

If you can make it past the (quite disgusting) first chapter, then you’ll be in it for the long haul. Great characters, spiky dialogue, twisty plot, worrying prescience and some fabulously gruesome set pieces and comeuppances.

Once upon a time, when the world was young, I sat my O levels. I passed 10 of the blighters. That was 20 years ago and, as these things are wont to do, my examination certificates have been mislaid. For strange reasons I have a bit of paper to prove that achieved grade 3 at the flute, and another to prove that I could swim 100 metres at the age of 9, but if I have to prove that I got an A grade at O level maths, no joy.

In the garden of my parents’ house is a big old willow tree. Attached to a branch some 30 or 40 feet up is this swing, which swings out over a tiny stream. Because the swing is actually attached to a block and tackle, it’s possible, once you have the knack to keep it swinging (and indeed increase the swing’s amplitude) by judiciously shortening and releasing the rope.

Oopsie! I managed to misconfigure the name of the comment script.

Which is one way of stopping comment spam I suppose, but not my preferred method. Comments should be working now.

After a certain amount of swearing (mostly caused by my own utter foolishness) we’re now running under MT 3. Time to go hunt handy plugins…

Here’s one of my photos from Eurofoo. I appear to have caught DJ Adams at a particularly gormless looking moment.

Mmm… Eurofoo. At what other technical conference could you spend an afternoon in an improvised comedy workshop, marvel at the bandwidth of five guys from Fotango toting a terabyte from London to Amsterdam in 45 minutes, gasp at the audacity of the BBC’s Creative Archive project and rave about a favourite tech book before discovering that said book’s editor is sat next to you?

At twelve minutes past noon today, my stepdaughter Iona gave birth to a 7lb 2oz son, Isaac Stamper.

I never expected I’d be a grandfather by 36…

I’ve been reading The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester, a history of the Oxford English Dictionary and, whilst I find his style a little annoying, the story is fascinating. In the first chapter, Winchester discusses the history of earlier English dictionaries One thing I find strange is that it took so long for dictionaries to progress from lists of ‘hard’ words to becoming the all inclusive things we know today. Early dictionary makers were happy to simply list and define the kinds of words that I imagine you’d find in a Readers’ Digest Word Power column whilst ignoring the nuts and bolts of the language. Maybe they just assumed that everyone already knew them.

Focusing a large format camera can be a tricky process if you’re not used to it. Unless you have a remarkably simple scene there’s usually a period of frantic adjustment of swings and tilts to try and get the plane of focus running through the most important elements of the scene. Most large format photographers will have heard of the Scheimpflug Rule which says that the plane of sharp focus, the film plane and the lens plane must all intersect in a single line. This is one of those useful in theory but useless in practice maxims.

The problem is that you can end up chasing your tail. Adjusting the focus moves the line of intersection, which means that the plane of sharp focus is suddenly missing the nearest point, so you adjust the tilt to take that into account, but that changes the angle of the plane of sharp focus so it misses the far point, so you adjust the focus, but…

According to a quick search of groups.google.com, I’ve been using the same email address for almost exactly 9 years now and in that time I’ve never succumbed to the temptation to monkey with my mail headers and start hiding my obscured email address down in my sigfile beneath a sign saying ‘Beware of the leopard’.

You probably don’t know this yet, but I’m in the process of preparing a course on Test Driven Development & Refactoring with Perl which I hope will find me some favour and income.

Remember boys and girls, always, always, always have a backup.

2025 Here

Yeah, tell me about it!

How long did it take me to finally get my finger out and move this blog over to the new box?

I think the only answer that makes sense is “Too long”.

One of my earliest memories is of standing on a low stool, stirring a teaspoonful of sugar into fresh yeast to wake it up while mum heated a pan of milk to blood heat before everything all got mixed together to make a lovely, enriched bread dough that, now I think about it, I could probably make tomorrow without recourse to a recipe book.