Grin with cat attached

Holiday snaps

2009-06-07T21:05:50Z

http://www.flickr.com/photos/parsingphase/sets/72157619310823523/

Why twitter's interesting

2009-04-03T10:11:19Z

Just had an interesting conversation with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Channel 4 Newsreader. It started when he commented:

For which he obviously got some flack, as it was shortly followed by:

which then turned into a brief but interesting conversation between he & I:

Not profound, maybe not fascinating, but an unusual & interesting way to give some direct feedback and get the ideas of someone I'd not otherwise have a chance to.

(Some of the appropriate content can be found via http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=&phrase=&ors=from%3Akrishgm+from%3Aparsingphase¬s=&tag=&lang=all&from=&to=&ref=&near=&within=15&units=mi&since=2009-04-03&until=2009-04-03&rpp=15 - but I can't work the search engine well enough to get the exact & full conversation)

No idea

2009-03-07T11:53:51Z

why this dropped into my mind while taking a shower earlier; possibly something to do with the rythmn of the extractor fan.

Some of you will be familiar with the traditional British kids' variant which starts with the same line.

While shepherds washed their socks by night
To get them clean and nice
The bloke from the laundrette dropped by
And gave them this advice:

Rinse no! He said
For there's a red
Sock in with all the white
Your laundry is now pink throughout
Due to this oversight.

"Won't somebody think of the drinkers?"

2009-02-23T16:54:34Z

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/248117/charity-child-abuse-filters-save-men-from-themselves.html

Levels of Liberal Linguistic Logic & Lunacy

2009-02-15T20:35:38Z

1) Refusing ever to leave the UK because the water tastes funny elsewhere (distinct, on various axes, from holidaying in the UK for financial, environmental or other reasons)

2) Travelling overseas, but TALKING ENGLISH IN A VERY LOUD AND CLEAR VOICE, 'cos the locals should speak english and are just being stubborn, damnit.

3) Holidaying strictly in anglophonic (yes I made that up, I think) countries because you only speak english and feel guilty that you can't speak local anywhere else.

4) Holidaying only in various Western European countries because you happened to learn a bit of the language at school.

5) Sticking to Western Europe but venturing into a few more countries where the languages kinda sound a bit like the ones you already learned, possibly also picking up the "$newLanguage in 24 hours" audiobook.

6) Venturing further afield, possibly to Greece or Russia where the alphabet's a bit different and the language family's quite distinct.

7) Trying to learn an ideographic language with new cultural references & up to three new alphabets to get your head around, with the vague idea you might go there sometime. This level may also just qualify as nuts.

So, yeah... I've been wandering around these levels over most of my life, with a current linguistic score somewhere as follows:

English (UK): Mother tongue, give or take my ability to get my tongue in a complete knot.

French: Fluent; studied since I was about 8; numerous holidays, exchanges, and a year of my degree spent in Paris.

Spanish: Learned as a regular GCSE and used on occasional holiday.

Latin: Studied at school to a fairly low level.

Norwegian: Learned a few words when I went on holiday at about 9? Forgotten all, I think.

Welsh: Used to be able to pronounce most of it right and sing the national anthem. Never knew what much of it meant.

German: Fluent. Studied in my final year at school and during my Uni degree; studied a year of my degree in Karlsruhe.

Irish: Fascinated by the language and mythology, utterly baffled by the pronunciation, got nowhere reasonably fast.

Italian: Learned a few words for recent holidays. Still have a habit of speaking Spanish instead.

Japanese: Learned a little specialist vocab for Aikido and food. Learning more recently after getting fascinated and deciding to make it this year's hobby (not intended as an insult). webcowgirl's ability to speak Mandarin & Japanese in restaurants is also quite inspiring.

Portuguese: Learned a little prior to a recent holiday. Still bemused by the fact that weekdays don't have names.

For most of the languages I've learned recently I bought the Earworms Learning audioguides, which are generally pretty good. It's all I really used for Portuguese for example, although I also had a couple of phrasebooks.

For Italian I have 2 volumes of the Earworms and the Berlitz Premier Italian (although I never finished the latter).

For Irish I have a Hodder & Stoughton teach yourself course with *tapes* which was frankly grossly underused.

For French, Spanish and German I used to have the huge Collins bilingual dictionaries, but those all went to Oxfam a few months back when I realised I never opened them and needed the space they took up. A couple have returned to me as iPhone apps.

For Japanese I've got quite a selection. I started off with two volumes of Earworms, then bought the Oxford "Take Off in Japanese" set, which is pretty good as a basic intro (and easy to follow) but almost ignores the Kana. I also got fascinated with Kanji via webcowgirl's copy of Read Japanese Today and then tried to start learning those, and various Kana via the iPhone flip apps and Undefined Fire's charts.

webcowgirl also recently bought me a copy of the more business-oriented Japanese for Busy People, which also seems very good, but as it's the Kana version I can't yet read the Japanese part well enough to use the book!

So, the next step's going to be a combination of Kana study and the Oxford guide until I can make the "Busy People" version more useful again. I've just ordered a couple more Kana books which may help.

One particular problem I'm having with Japanese is that of holding more than two concepts at once; I'm used to holding both the English and foreign forms of words in my mind together, but adding in the Katakana, Hiragana and/or Kanji versions to the mix is a bit of a brain-melter.

(How many people I know actually speak or read Japanese, anyway?)

A post

2009-02-10T21:35:02Z

There's an icon here for someone in the second panel:
http://www.wapsisquare.com/d/20090210.html

You may have noticed that my loudtwitter feed has switched off. I figure people can follow me on twitter if they want. I still read LJ but am likely to post *very* infrequently.

If you only watch

2009-01-29T11:45:45Z

one video of two fleeing court prisoners running into a lamp-post today, watch this one:

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/law_order/power+pole+foils+new+zealand+escape/2914162

Ideas for LJ apps to write

2009-01-02T12:32:26Z

Would anyone use these if I wrote them?

(ETA Looks like LoudTwitter can be persuaded to post to groups.)

1) Tweet2LJ
This app allows a user to automatically post their tweets to a specified group in their LJ account (LoudTwitter only allows public posting).

It may in future allow users to post two streams; one in "real time", one in "batch mode".

It will need to log into LJ and extract a group list.

It will need to log into LJ to post.

It will need to memorise, or have specified:
The journal name
The journal password
The twitter account

For locked twitter streams, it will also require the twitter password!

It will need to know, or calculate, the "last sent" time for a batch.

2) Crowd Control
A related app is a "group self-organiser".

An LJ user may nominate a group on their journal as self-organising.

Users *on the primary user's friend list* will be able to add or remove themselves from
this group.

They can log into the hosting website by using their LJ username, which will be converted to an OpenID and authenticated against the LJ site. (The friends DO NOT need to supply their passwords to the hosting site).

The hosting site will then modify those groups via the LJ API (http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.xml-rpc.editfriends.html).

For each primary user, the system will need to store:
- Username
- journal password
- group(s) to allow self-organisation on

The system MUST NOT allow users/friends to see or deduce their membership of other groups, or the membership lists of the self-organising groups.

Sinfest says it best

2009-01-01T11:02:37Z

General and Specific Theories of Literary Exasperation

2008-12-28T19:18:36Z

General:

ARGH I own too many books!

Specific:

ARGGGGHHHH I own too many books I've never read!

(Having shed most of the cruft a year ago, though, it's a pretty good collection)

I has a Nomlet!

2008-12-25T14:11:25Z

Well, it's not exactly a traditional Christmas lunch, but it's still delicious; I've just been out on a bike ride, the first one since I moved to Putney (over a year ago!) as part of my plan to get a lot more exercise (which was foiled for the last several months by the bad foot). A 10K ride (thought I'd start simple) up to Richmond Park (full of deer!) and back along Upper Richmond Road; still haven't shaken off my cough entirely so my lungs were protesting a bit, but it's *so* much nicer to ride here than it was in Brixton!

My 3-egg cheese-and-ham omelette is joined by an apple, crunchy salad and, thanks to the wonders of parbaked baguettes, hot, fresh, buttered bread :) Not bad at all! :)

I think the rest of today may involve a little cleaning of the flat, but mainly chilling out and a few Christmas phone calls. And possibly some Babylon 5, unless the TV gets a lot more exciting...

It's that day again!

2008-12-25T11:38:36Z

Happy Christmas, peoples!

Mine's getting off to a bit of a slow start - I got a decent number of hours' sleep last night, although it wasn't of the best quality, but I feel better for it. I was distinctly wiped out yesterday but still had great fun playing Munchkin with booklectic, barking_watcher and adjectivemarcus, in a game which had much the requisite amount of silliness, and culminated in a ludicrous pie-related winning move. Great fun, hope I wasn't babbling too much due to tiredness. Also (very briefly) played Little Big Planet (the graphics are astounding) very badly and chatted to duranorak a bit before heading back to feed the cat and pick up a pressie from webcowgirl's house.

Today's a quiet one for me - I have just the one pressie to open which I'll do in a moment, although I did buy myself series 1 of Babylon 5 last night. My family had its Christmas celebration last weekend - probably the first time we've all been in the same place in years, and it was fantastic. As well as my parents and siblings, my sister's husband and daughter and brother's fiancée were also there, and it was a great atmosphere. My niece is jut about to start crawling but can't quite find forward gear yet, but is still incredibly curious and cute. Plus we had a very good turkey dinner :)

Work's been fairly busy right up to the break, so it's nice just to be able to chill out today. I may try and get some exercise in a bit, and need to go feed the cat again sometime.

Oh, and Happy Birthday Isaac Newton. Probably.

ETA Yay! Great pressie, webcowgirl *smooches* :)

On the move

2008-12-17T00:16:27Z

07:48 @webcowgirl *lol* :) #
07:48 So what *do* I have to do to get a decent night's sleep anyway? :( #
08:07 Well, that took longer to arrive than we expected: www.sockandawe.com/ #
10:11 class parsingphase { [...] function __sleep() { sleep(3600); } } // OK, which b*'d put that in my personal source code? #
11:21 In a maze of RewriteRules, all infuriating. AGAIN. #
14:33 Where would one look in London for a decent range of Pedometers? #
15:30 @hodgman 'fraid not: bit.ly/5oOX #
18:45 @noirem Council has promised to fix it - DBs still don't think my flat exists though. #
19:42 @elliottkember Such is the joy of Frameworks. Zend keep doing that to me. #
21:36 Feels like I've got a cold creeping up on me - must be that time of year again #

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Lack of Today

2008-12-14T20:18:34Z

I've been awake for all of 7 hours so far today, during which time I've sorted out the paperwork for a bank meeting tomorrow, booked a holiday with webcowgirl, and had a rather nice dinner.

And only twittered once, which is unnatural.

I *think* that counts as productive...

ION

2008-11-29T23:40:03Z

Duck Phoora at Chula was *delicious*

VO

2008-11-29T22:03:23Z

And when the father turned to his family, and saw that the snow doves had torn out the left eyes of his two stepdaughters, and both eyes of his wife, he said to them: "Come on. Let's go home."

From the Lyric Hammersmith website and brochure:

"It is winter.

The Queen has declared that there will be a glittering festival of music, magic and dancing so that her son might find the girl of his dreams. Everyone is invited to his astonishing palace.

BUT... Cinderella won’t be going to the Ball - unless she manages to finish the impossible tasks her sisters have set her. Maybe her friends from the forest can help her?

The acclaimed director Melly Still returns to the original story by the Brothers Grimm to create a spellbinding show for the whole family to enjoy."

‘Anyone looking for superior family-friendly December fare should set their sat-navs for Hammersmith.’ - Evening Standard

Sounds almost like the Disney version, doesn't it? Unless, of course, you recognise what "returns to the original story by the Brothers Grimm" means. Domestic abuse, emotional blackmail, dark magic, self-mutilation and surprisingly graphic gore. Small children hiding under the seats and wailing.

Quite an intense play, but perhaps not exactly what it was advertised as; I get the impression the Lyric hadn't quite realised what they'd booked.

Also slightly second-rate acting and performance, as is typical for the Lyric.

Lyric site

Icon borrowed from thewronghands

wechsler @ 2008-11-27T18:08:00

2008-11-27T18:09:09Z

Today is just Epic Fail.

wechsler @ 2008-11-24T17:33:00

2008-11-24T17:34:34Z

No, it's not healing.

It just looked like it was healing because I hadn't been wearing shoes for most of last week.

On the move

2008-11-20T00:34:19Z

11:44 Another prescription for antibiotics for the toe - 4th time lucky? #
14:22 Pair of cheap/free tickets for excellent modern dance at Royal Opera House tonight available - see is.gd/87ri #
19:24 twitpic.com/mpse - I win at omelettes ☺ #

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Tickets for Wayne MacGregor tonight going spare

2008-11-19T14:20:16Z

I'd booked two tickets to see the Wayne MacGregor "Voluntaries / The Lesson / Infra" show at the Royal Opera House tonight but, due to webcowgirl's illness, we can't use them. It's modern dance / Ballet. That said, it's accessible stuff; I'm no dance buff but MacGregor's one of two choreographers whose work I really enjoy. I have a review of the last piece I saw at http://www.phase.org/journal/parsingphase/post/19349

If anyone wants them, please let me know; they can be collected from the Box Office, but I'll need to give you the booking code to release them. Please comment and/or call me if you're interested. (friends *should* be able to see phone number here: http://wechsler.livejournal.com/379868.html) email is richard@phase.org

They're balcony seats, nominally £30, but while I'd like some cash for them if at all possible, I'd also rather see them used than wasted (so if you can't pay, don't stress).

Show info: http://www.roh.org.uk/whatson/production.aspx?pid=7067

On the move

2008-11-19T00:43:43Z

11:46 Heading into town for lunch with @webcowgirl. Weather really nice, if chilly. #
15:37 Exploring the Westfield shopping centre. It's unfeasably huge. Found a little gift for @webcowgirl though. #
18:52 Dear Headache. Pls to go away nao. #
19:40 Oh look, LJ's back. #

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On the move

2008-11-18T00:45:31Z

11:50 Half of my train is late. This seems to be particularly British. #
14:54 Watching "Babylon 5 - The Gathering" #
16:46 B5 pilot as good as I remembered - but I now have product lust: is.gd/7QWt #
17:03 Isn't the phrase "presumed consent" one of the scariest a government can produce? #
22:50 Finally subdued Zend Framework's plugins, helpers, MVC, routers, and sessions, and got the blog app working. Tomorrow deployment & PHPL work #

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On the move

2008-11-17T00:27:32Z

16:42 Heading back to Cambridge with parents after visiting Grandma. #

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On the move

2008-11-15T00:40:43Z

07:40 Retweeting @ijansch: o'reilly is going to launch a php certification! tinyurl.com/5vdx5t #
10:35 Volume of calls from recruitment consulants has soared in the last week - obviously getting increasingly desperate to place candidates. #
12:56 @silkyraven: Retweeting @mtabini: I think I have discovered the Starbucks secret: they keep the dirt when they harvest the coffee beans. #
13:42 @SilkyRaven @boo_kitty kept you awake? #
14:43 Energy levels currently soaring like a brick. Holiday in 3 hours. #
17:58 EJECT! EJECT! (Or in other words, off to Cambridge again). #

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On the move

2008-11-14T00:28:41Z

10:32 @Shrikeh Indeed #
11:18 There's probably a prize for bugs like this: twitpic.com/li69 #
11:21 my Twitterank is 21.71! twitterank.com/view/parsingphase . I'm obviously not l33t. #
12:27 @webcowgirl Because they don't have a l33t QA person like you. #
12:32 @webcowgirl We'll try and keep the internets safe for you. #
13:44 twitpic.com/lilm - Allegedly, there's a kebab somewhere under all that salad. #
17:23 @PaulLomax The acronym just *reeks* of glamour! #
17:38 Ooops! Event at QEH starts earlier than I thought! Better move it! #
18:43 Event at QEH (Michael Palin talk) does not start earlier than I thought, TicketMaster lied. #
18:44 @Shrikeh just don't get 'em mixed up. #
19:01 twitpic.com/lk9f - Talk by famed global traveller; none of the audience can even find their seats, as numbers hidden under armrests. #
20:31 Palin talk is excellent and a lot of fun. ☺ #
21:48 Rest of Palin (no relation) talk excellent; haven't laughed that much in a while. Need to track down Dr Fake's Encyclopaedia. #
22:53 @silkyraven: Found the book: is.gd/7p0p #
23:01 Ultimate URI from hell: (click to see) preview.tinyurl.com/5r4rkx #
23:04 @davidgerard Michael Palin was reading extracts from it tonight, eg: "Party games: 'Pass the Bengal Tiger'" #
23:05 @davidgerard Please, nobody click that! #
23:53 Time to stop drinking the twitterhol and go sleep #

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