jack

Holy flarking shit, it's cold outside. There may or may not have been any kind of atmosphere, I didn't stop to see.

Pedant note: Yes, this is more than one line, but only because of the pedant note.

Pedant note: In actual fact, there was atmosphere (defined as gravitationally bound gas, including approx 20% ox, 80% inert), as I can deduce from a variety of retrospective clues, such as the absence of exploding eyeballs, etc. This is a rhetorical technique, exaggerating an effect to create a feeling of, as well as knowledge of, its significance.

Many rhetorical techniques use counter-factual, or perhaps a-factual statements, but can be described as "not wrong" because although they convey less literal truth, they often convey more of an underlying, more relevant truth.

Pedant note: This was last night. This morning it was quite nice, and right now I don't know, because I'm inside.

On Friday I was cycling up the top of Campkin road, and passing the "road narrowed" zebra crossing, when I found a white van heading straight for me. Fortunately, we could both stop, and I squeezed off onto the pavement and all was fine.

The thing is, me being obviously in the wrong, would have been very annoying. Him been obviously in the wrong, would also have been very annoying. But as he passed, he called out of the window. It was either "My god, I'm sorry, mate!" or "Can't you fucking read, mate?" but I can't tell which, and being left not knowing whether to be sympathetic or angry with him was VERY VERY annoying.

(Give way markings and a sign saying "give way to oncoming traffic" in that direction, and not in this direction, incline me to the view that he should have stopped.)

A friend's girlfriend saw me in the street wearing a suit, and their comment was "It says something about you that our best guess was that you were doing office-themed LARP, rather than going to a job interview or something."

In fact, I was going to BA dinner with college daughter and college niece.

FWIW, most people I know do very much tend to jeans and black T-shirts sort of clothes. I hypothesise that we generally value time above appearance, and also have a streak of non-conformance. And I hypothesise that that makes dressing up for social events and special occasions more attractive.

In fact, due to equally proportioned blame confusion, we were going to BA dinner the *next* night, and so I joined them and Is-and-her-James (all their boyfriends are called James, it's just one of those things) for Pizza Express.

But it's quite nice wearing a suit out. It looks good and is comfortable. I would more often, except for the aforementioned lack of desire to get smart clothes cleaned and ironed regularly, and the fact that ironing shirts better might pass unnoticed (and be definitely a good thing), wearing a suit casually would produce nothing but remarks :)

I still find excuses to wear suits on dates sometimes :)

I went swimming at Jesus Green yesterday and it was great.

I just did 13 lengths of Jesus Green, but felt quite cleansed after. My legs felt weak afterwards, and my arms ached a touch this morning, from which I judge it to have been actually a decent workout, and yet easy to *do*, not in constant pain like trying to go jogging :)

I hadn't been swimming for years[1], not since I was at school. Dad and I used to swim quite a lot (often and far, in fact, I was briefly quite selkie).

[1] Except last week, I *had* arranged to go in the cam at the puntmoot, in lead up to taking up swimming again.

I thought it might be too cold, it hadn't been a very summery day, and flirting with raining. But the water was cool, which felt pretty good, and to make up for it, the showers were full and hot, which felt very very good. Though it would be nice to be sunny *sometimes*

I thought I mightn't be able to do it any more. In fact, I was AFAICT, pretty slow -- I can still swim, but not with a very efficient technique any more. But I can get up and down enough that it works rather than doesn't work.

I thought I might be embarrassed at stripping off in public -- my sveltness wars with my tact and my constantness as aspects that appeal people to me the least :) I think the same every time I get a new girlfriend, for that matter. But since Ghoti's party, I decided I might be able to improve it, but didn't see any point worrying about it. And indeed, no-one objected, and somehow when everyone's drenched its different.

It was quite quiet. There were at most half-a-dozen people, all circular swimming, so pretty much no-one's in anyone's way whatever happens. A couple of people in mini-wetsuits (which makes you look like you know what you're doing), a couple of middle-aged men who look like they could swim for leagues, a young couple who seemed to come to swim two lengths and shower together :) A young man in red shorts who practised diving with the lifeguards whenever the middle was clear. I met one of the men in the changing area coming out, and he said he came every day, and highly recommended it.

ETA: And I dropped my watch, but it overfulfulls its waterproof rating, and a nice man found it for me, and I can still manage to scoop stuff up from the bottom in a shallowish end.

Thanks to Rosy for making a great cloak (pictures... somewhere). Squee. Hugs. It's sky-blue with a silver lining, and with a frilled shirt looks absolutely gorgeous. Why can't I enjoy normal clothes that much?

And is insanely good when ceilidhing, it adds expression to every movement, and swirls, and envelops people, and keeps you warm. Except I don't need to be kept warm in a ceilidh :)

The banquet was fun -- alternating interesting food with dancing, is about the best combination I can imagine. And I met some new nice people. The only problem was lots of people dashed out to the LARP before without eating properly, so were starving in anticipation by the time the starter was coming out.

LARP was fun. Orcs nearly -- but not quite -- overran the city. I need to practice being competent and safe with weapons, but it was fun, and I had a few great moments, hopping over to finish good guys off :)

On thursday I cycled out to Ninewell, one of the small nature reserves round Cambridge. It's a tiny wood with a sluggish shallow stream leaking out of a number of chalk wells, supposedly feeding Hobson's Conduit.

It's very strange to cycle up to a layby and get out. Normally I'm either going somewhere, and cycle up to the door, or going for a walk in the country, and go in a car/train.

It's pretty. Walking around nature always gets the creative juices going -- I updated the beetles in my flash game (not online yet) making them face diagonally, which makes them feel considerably more aggressive whilst being about as easy to squish -- and enables a few more levels.

Just the other side of the wood is a national cycle route alongside the railway which I incporporated in my route back. Along the centre were coloured footlong stripes, stretching into the distance, which I wondered about, thinking it was a cycle route thing.

Do you know? See http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/transport/projects/cambridge/shelford_addenbrookes_cycle_path.htm -- it's a commemorative depiction of a section of genome, with four colours for G, C, T, and A.

When I was walking along I wondered if I could tell which direction the pattern went. Not really, and of course, it does have one, but I probably could never have told by examining it. But if you had two (or more) colours of stripes you could use but nothing else, could you indicate a prefered direction?

Using a rainbow pattern is cheating. You can't use a 1,2 pattern because that's symmetric. You could have w,b,ww,bb, but only if you know white comes first :) wbwwbbwwwbbb or rbbgggrbbggg work. But are you sure you'd *which* way it was telling you to go? Is there a better suggestion?

I found a half written post from last monday. I tend to try to collate these so if I have an interesting thought I can finish writing it up later, but this might as well be shared.

* Happy Starwars Day
* The problem with this meme is I end up thinking about it all day until it goes off. Setting an alarm to do it at a random time would make it worse, as I'd always be on tenterhooks. But I am spodding things I wouldn't otherwise so I'll probably keep doing it.
* Yay, M&S wedding next week!
*LARP: haven't fixed character, or kit, not sure whether to go, or go with a temporary character, or ceilidh.
* I like the smell of chlorine (as provided by drain cleaner), probably because it reminds me of going swimming with dad.
* Work: Two weeks after I pump out some code, flatten out the problems, and pat it into place in the whole project, I find a couple of bugs sprouting from it like mushrooms. I don't like what this metaphor is comparing my code to :)

Blockus

On tuesday I missed Tolkien because I'm too fond of the quiz and went to games evening. We played Blockus, which I thought was a very elegant game. One has board of about 30x30? squares, and each player has pieces, one of each shape of 1-, 2-,... 5-ominos (eg. the one [][][][][] piece would cover 5 consecutive squares of the board). You start placing a piece in your corner, and thereafter take it turns to place a piece one square of which diagonally-adjacent to a square of a piece you'd already placed AND NOT HAVING any square orthogonally adjacent to one. (Winner is the one with the fewest squares left when no-one can go.)

Excusing the slightly awkward ruling, there's just that one rule, but leads to fun consequences. Surround area so your opponents are denied it and you can fill it later. Squiggle diagonally between other players diag-touching pieces and fill other areas of the board.

Lord of the Fries, Villa Piletti, Hogwarts Cluedo

At sonicdrift's on sunday we played Lord of the Fries, a pretty silly, scoring-by-getting-rid-of-sets-of-cards games about Zombies in a fast food restaurant. Also Villa Piletti again, which is nice.

And hogwarts cluedo, which was quite a nice adaption of it. I never used to *really* like cluedo -- I felt if only I could write all the information down right it'd be obvious but tedious to work it out, but that was never practical, and never worked out the best way. Which meant it was never really *fun* to play because I was feeling I should. I've a better feel now, enough to not take it too seriously, though I will look up some strategy at some point. The touch of humanity was people spontaneously ganging up one player with the evil ghost.

It was a nice evening, though I'm not sure if people clashed a bit by feeling like different sorts of games at different times, leading to no-one being completely satisfied.

Penultima

At post-pizza we played penultima again, the game where each Spectator chooses a rule for how type of chess piece should move and the Players try to figure it out during the game. I think it *sometimes* works quite well socially because spectators can reasonably chat while people are thinking and don't have to take it *too* seriously. And I like the working it out, because if the rules are chosen right you have enough of a feel for what they do not to be completely blind, but aren't overwhelmed by strategy as if you knew them all and had to work out a winning combination.

When the rules I was playing against were revealed I was quite pleased how they all seemed to hit the sweet spot of not too obvious before hand, but possible to work with, and obvious in retrospect. And I liked the names. We even developed a bit of an endgame, which was interesting as I had made some lucky guesses and had a fair idea of how several pieces moved -- but had had most of them taken. And then we rushed to finish so we could go home and sleep.

Bridget Jones I saw all of the movie, and liked it a lot. I take back disparaging comments -- though I still think the book is laugh out loud funny like few other things and should be read. Before I only saw the second half, and didn't get a lot of the changes. A fistfight? Really?

A friend was asking if it wasn't non-feminist. I'm not sure any more. She is rather hopeless. But then I identify with her as me, as anyone, though some of her hopelessness is expressed in relationships in a different way to I do, perhaps due to gender[1]. And she is hopeless the way half the population is, but is reasonably successful. And she does do some pro-active things, if less so in the field of relationships. Though she certainly tries.

Timecop I was all prepared to yell at the time travel. IIRC it wasn't especially worse than many, though I was puzzled by some what determines who isn't changed by a timeline change issues as normal. In fact, I lost it in the first minute, before time travel was even mentioned. What was special about the gold? They carbon dated it and it came from 17xx.

Is it just me, or is that odd? Firstly, gold doesn't normally have much carbon in, especially organic carbon, does it? OK, suppose they measure the decay of an isotope of gold. Why would it change when the gold is, um, stamped into bullion? OK, suppose the radiation is slightly greater on the surface than in the mine, and they can measure that change. What isotope are they looking at? The second-most-stable has a half-life of six months. Doh. I give up.

It did teach me what metastable isotopes are. That was interesting.

Stargate Daniel Jackson/Claudia Black OTP Squee!

Deal or no deal For anyone else lucky enough not to follow TV, the idea is you have 20 shuffled boxes with amounts in from 1¢ to £0.25M. You choose a few, discard them, then accept an offer related to the average of the amounts remaining, or continue -- if there's one box left, you get what's in it. It is *really annoying*

[1] I know that should be sex. But at least gender is non-ambiguous, as one amusing conversation underlined.

Saturday was the big birthday party for lnr, mobbsy and damerell at the Cow, formerley the Red Cow iirc. It seemed to work out pretty well as a venue, there was enough room, and a dancefloor, and an open bar does simplify birthday alcohol!

I went on the dancefloor a couple of times, but still aren't accustomed to bopping. Probably because I only ever used to experience it when I went clubbing with people from school, which wasn't really ever that fun. I stole a few minutes of salsa and cha cha with amenable girls, but never really got into the swing of real music.

I met again several nice people I've seen around, and time flew past. I disappeared for the last half an hour of the round ceilidh, but didn't see anyone I knew there.

Happy brithday and thanks to the three of them!

I already blogged Sunday, didn't I?