Arthur's Journal

Or in our case, turning into my grandparents. Today we did that most favoured of their hobbies "going for a drive" followed by "sitting in car park looking at the view". We'd planned to have our first proper family picnic but J fell asleep on the way there unexpectedly so we ended up driving round looking at pretty villages (no great hardship) followed by parking up for 20 mins in Millington Pastures. When he still didn't wake up we went with plan B and headed back to Hagg Wood in Dunnington so we'd be nearer York when it came time to go home.

So after a lot of round-about-ness (and 30 miles in the car), we finally ended up about 4 miles from home having a lovely picnic. We even managed to get more than 100m from the car.



The degree to which children turn one into one's parents never ceases to amase me. I try to ensure it doesn't, but there's a cosmic force that can't be resisted.

I wandered round the Cemetery in the rain one lunchtime last week.

( PIctures......... )

Give it a minute to get going. Insane

We have two kittens from the Cats Protection League:

Poppy:



Freya:



They are both on my lap alternating fighting, grooming each other and trying to stand on the keyboard.

It's been a while since I posted, so to make up, here's a long one.

I've been getting rid of books again.

I send a large number of books to charity shops when we moved out of Millfield Rd, and had send some of the worst "never going to read those even once" offenders away a long time before that (Exhibit A being a copy of a Jackie Collins book that I'd had for 15 years and possibly as many house moves and still never read), but there's still something hard to do about getting rid of books.

I've currently got a pile on the study floor of stuff to get rid of that contains every CD I own plus over 100 books. Since the total dross went long ago, these have been harder to sift. The easy ones were the tech ones ("Programming Python, updated for Python 2.3" etc). I've winnowed my tech books down to just classics: Knuth, Kerningham and Pike, K&R (only for sentimental reasons), Beautiful Code, Applied Crypto and not a lot else. Fiction was harder, but a robust "am I ever going to read this ever again" and reduced things to just a few: Harry Potter (for James), Iain (M) Banks, Alastair Reynolds, George RR Martin, Stephen Donaldson (the Gap series only), Umberto Eco and some odds and ends by other authors. I've kept the odd thing I'm never going to read for sentimental reasons: some poetry given to me by my grandmother, my thesis (no-one else is ever going to read that one either :) ) but mostly I've been ruthless.

I've also kept all the photo books: not only are these are fairly recent, but they are all beautifully printed and designed. Not something that will move to a Kindle anytime soon.

That cuts things down to about two large bookshelves worth. That seems enough. More further down this post about the future plans.

So why do we keep all these books? I know many people with enough books to start a small (or in some cases a medium sized) library, but even those of us with less like to keep every book we've ever read. Why? There's some obvious reasons

1) They are a middle class status symbol and let one look down on houses with just a 60" TV. True, but I don't think that's the motivation for most of my friends or,

2) It's a mild form of OCD

Of course, given enough books, they also make a poor form of insulation :)

I used to think that home interior stylists (e.g. feng shui) who advocated covering up books were nuts. Now I still think that feng shui advocates are nuts, but think they may have a point on the books. More and more, my ideal room is large, wood-lined, white painted (French-style), has big windows onto a lawn, some comfortable chairs, a table to put a cuppa on and, well, not a lot else. No books. No TV. Some power points. Just somewhere comfortable to read.

My friend Jack perfected this a long time ago - he reads books (and he reads a lot and very widely) but then gives them away, either to friends or charity shops. He's down to about two shelves worth of books (helped by living in a small flat in Tokyo). Seems a good aim.

I have a new phone. It's a very, very shiny new phone to which I am now welded. It's a Samsung Galaxy phone running Android. Even better, it's got a passable camera and can run the obligatory picture-mangling app (I'm using Vignette).




Other excellent stuff I've put on there includes the Guardian Anywhere for reading the paper on the go, gReader Pro (a Google Reader client), Twidroyd for Twitter, Meebo IM, TED Mobile, ASTRO file management (including network shares), Adiko eBook reader and the rather unofficial myPlayer for BBC iPlayer.

The result is that writing this post is the first time I've got the proper laptop out in days.

( cameraphone pics )
ObTech: Samsung made a mistake when designing the phone by opting to use their own (closed source) filesystem instead of the standard linux one. The resulting performance problems are so bad that I rooted the phone the day after getting it to install RyanZA's OCLF which solves the issue by creating an ext2 filesystem for app data. The difference in how the phone feels is remarkable. Hopefully the shortly-to-be-released Android 2.2. update for the Galaxy S will fix this in a more supported way.

There's something so cool about having a root shell on your phone.

This is (part of) why I hate celebrity culture. If people didn't buy the mags and visit the websites, this wouldn't go on. Yes, I know it's partly a two way street, but there's no excuse for this sort of crap, especially with a young child around. The video is from 2008. I'm sure it's got worse not better since.



My new resolution is to not read the mags even when they are lying around. Which I have been known to: there's an awful fascination to them.

Three pictures from inside the house and without people.



( two more )

It's been a busy weekend. Creepy-crawlies, car boots and bouncy castles, but today I got some time off for good behaviour and wandered into town to see the city centre races. This was part of a national set of city centre bike races (the Elite races are televised by Sky) and was organised by Clifton CC my old cycling club. Since I'm not a member this year, I didn't feel obliged to try and help so enjoyed wandering along as a spectator.

It felt good to see cycling so visible and with the clout to take over a large chunk of town for most of the afternoon (the various events ran from 2pm - 8pm), and with a minimal amount of grumbling that I heard. No doubt the letters page of the York Press will be full of whining on Monday, but what I saw was a lot of people enjoying themselves watching some pretty good racing (with the odd big crash thrown in for good measure).

Sadly I couldn't stop for most of the Elite race, which was a shame as the rain and the darkness was making things very photogenic. I suspect the riders didn't share my views on the weather :)

( 4 pictures (from a lot) )

I've started a new blog at http://www.clune.org It'll mainly be about Information Security/work related things. Personal stuff will stay here.

I have a vague plan to do a post a week. We'll see. There's some content there for now, and there's even RSS feeds for those that want that sort of new fangled technology.