Thursday 26 November 2009

Deep Abiding Loves - Part 2: Radio 4

From as early as I can remember, Radio 4 has been there for me. I couldn't avoid it, since my mum tended to have it on during those days when she was actually a housewife, so it was essentially on all day. Both my parents still listen to it when doing something relatively menial, or when something good is on.

My earliest memories are listening to The Archers. Much has been written about this venerable program; indeed, it is the longest running soap opera in the world. I listen off and on to this, it being like eaves-dropping on neighbours rather than a piece of serious drama.

The dramas are on the whole pretty good. The one I have just listened to, Far North, was what impelled me to blog about the station, even though it turns out that it was actually first broadcast on Australian radio. The dramas I remember particularly fondly are The Lord of the Rings and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. You would never get any other radio station do anything like these.

On the whole, it is the factual programs which I tend to listen to. It seems to me that there are very few decent serious current affairs programs left on the television. The best ones are Analysis and File on 4, which often do reporting on stories that no news stations would ever bother covering. Discussion programs range from the deadly serious Melvyn Bragg program "In Our Time", to the deadly-serious knock-about "The Moral Maze" to less serious fluff such as "Midweek". All have their place. The science programs "The Material World" and "Leading Edge" are usually excellent. Sadly, Radio 4 is the only non-dumbed down place to get science broadcasting. Horizon on BBC2 long ago resorted to making drama or power-point presentations with patronising voice-overs in the place of a serious attempt to communicate science.

The weakest type of program are currently the comedies. For every I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue and The News Quiz, there are some deeply bad ones, usually written by bad stand-up comedians, straight from the Cambridge University footlights. Even the generally good Mitchell and Webb have a radio show which is a mix of good and bad sketches.

Finally, I really ought to mention the news programs. The news bulletins are all pretty good. Unfortunately, The Today Program has become a vehicle for the egos of the likes of John Humphries, who I now actively dislike. It used to be very good in the 70s and 80s when Brian Redhead did the program, but I now find the political interviews generally a waste of time. And to be frank, the whole program is way too self-congratulatory. Much better is The World at One, which in a half hour does short and to the point reportage. However, the best program is PM, which recently became solely presented by the excellent Eddie Mair, who is probably its best presenter ever. He is unfailingly polite and calm, even when interviewing the most difficult of subjects, and brings a wonderful light touch and sense of humour to the program.

All in all, this is a fantastic service. Whilst I find it occasionally a bit too politically correct, and there is a distinct left-wing bias in all its programming, I am very glad that it remains.

Wednesday 18 November 2009

Waters of Mars

I loved the latest Doctor Who special The Waters of Mars. Yet again, it had zombies - this time the poor humans on Bowie Base were being converted into servants of "The Flood", a kind of unseen entity frozen in a glacier (by the Ice Warriors of things - yet another Russell T. Davies continuity reference) that had been recently tapped as water supply for the base. It seems to give you a particularly bad case of chapped lips and scary eyes. You also get a weird ability to exude water from your body. It starts with a few drips down your arms, and ends with projectile vomiting torrents of H20 out of your mouth. And as the Doctor says, "Don’t drink the water. Don’t even touch it. Not one drop.", otherwise you get taken over by The Flood.

After the classic initial hostile reception, the Doctor gets involved with his usual enthusiasm, until he realises that he has unwittingly stumbled into a historic event - one, as with the Fires of Pompeii, he is unable or unwilling to get involved with due to the "Laws of Time". For most of the story, he remains as essentially an observer, and actually refuses to help the leader, Adelaide, because she is destined to be the inspiration for humanity leaving the Earth, and this only happens if she dies. The Doctor tells Adelaide this, and not only does she believe the Doctor, she is prepared to nuke the base, if that is what it takes to make sure history survives. However, at the last minute, the Doctor has a change of heart. This section is brilliant. After all the awful scenes of the humans being assimilated one by one, he returns in "Doctor mode", and manages to save the last three, including Adelaide. And I loved him for that.

However, they are not as happy as the Doctor thinks. Adelaide asks why did he do this, and the answer is essentially "because I can". It becomes apparent from the Doctor's arrogant attitude that he believes that since he is the last Time Lord left, why shouldn't he able to change history to make him feel better. She actually ends up committing suicide in her old house. This is a big change from the character we saw played by Christopher Ecclestone. And it seems that by changing history, he has hastened his own demise: he gets a vision of Ood Sigma telling him that he has little time left; and when he goes back into the TARDIS, the cloister bell is ringing.

Despite this, I was slightly confused about the in-world logic here. The idea seemed initially be that the ex-humans were literally dehydrating themselves to provide the water. This would have been a cool concept, as they would be left as husks. However, the amount of water was way over the top for that. Later on, it seemed that they were literally creating water out of nothing. However, if this was the case, why did they want to seize the oceans of earth? The only explanation that makes sense is that they were somehow channelling the water from the glacier. Best not to think about it (like a lot of recent Doctor Who).

I was also confused about Adelaide's motive for committing suicide. For a start, she had no definite proof that the Doctor was initially "right" about letting her die on Mars. She only had the Doctor's word on it. Also, by committing suicide on Earth, I can't see why that would somehow "fix" the timeline back to the original. As the Doctor says, she could end up mentoring her grandchild to make exactly the same inter-system flight that she makes in the original timeline.

However, all in all, this was a welcome return to form, after the last two dreadful specials. The next two episodes look like they are going to be good.

Monday 16 November 2009

Andrew and Emma's Wedding

This weekend I attended my cousin Andrew's wedding to his new wife, Emma. Whilst I am very fond of my cousins, Andrew and Christopher, we rarely meet other than at Christmas / New Year. As a result, I hadn't actually met Emma until the day itself, and thank God she turned out to be a really lovely person.

It was the first Catholic wedding I'd been to. I was wondering whether there would be any differences with the standard CofE affair, but it was only halfway where I had a certain amount of cognitive dissonance at the end of the Lord's Prayer. I was about to go onto

For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
when I realised that the left side of the church (predominantly Catholic) had already said "Amen". This happened about fifteen minutes later as well, so it wasn't me falling asleep or going deaf.

The reception was really good - in a converted barn way out beyond Epping. I have to admit that I didn't mix that day with anyone other than my immediate family. Partly because it is rare that I see them all together in one place, but also because having not had much sleep and countless glasses of wine, I was seriously beginning to get tired way too early. To be able to talk to people I have never met before, I have to be on top form, and that includes a good night's sleep.

The speeches were all excellent: heartfelt and moving, and also really funny. Andrew and Emma talked with great feeling and honesty, with was touching. Christopher's best man speech was a real tour de force. And Emma's father gave a really good summing up of Andrew's character. Yes, that's thing about both the Mills brothers - they're fundamentally decent people. I'm proud to know them.

* * *

It is amazing, but I am yet to go to a bad wedding. I have heard about nightmare weddings where there have been bad atmosphere, embarrassing mishaps, and horrible priests or vicars. Let's hope I never have to experience that.

Friday 13 November 2009

Deep Abiding Loves: Part 1 - Jethro Tull

As with my late-onset comic book habit, I got into buying music fairly late in life. Whilst I didn't actively dislike 80s pop music, at the time I never really got into the whole teenage annoying your parents thing. Possibly because I was a very non-rebellious teenager, and I just couldn't get that enthused about it. At the time, I probably played more music than actively listened to it.

It wasn't until the summer holidays before my first year at university that I finally started delving into the wonderful world of music. And typically for me, it hadn't been in the singles charts since 1970. I accidentally listened to a program on Radio 1 in which Ian Anderson and Martin Barre of Jethro Tull were playing a live acoustic session, and I was completely enthralled. Finally, this was the music I had been looking for, but hadn't realised it.

I find it difficult to classify the band (often a good thing). Some of their music is distinctly hard rock combined with acoustic instruments (Aqualung); some is blatant prog-rock (Thick as a Brick); some is straight acoustic (Wond'ring Aloud). One notable quirk is the unusual use of the flute in both acoustic and rock pieces (Locomotive Breath). This all makes their music slightly odd. But this is nothing to how utterly insane the band looked during their classic (1970s) period (represented by all the last few links).

Whilst at University, I started to learn guitar after being inspired by Jethro Tull. In fact, my earliest mention on the internet is thanks to the band. Around '91, I was on a Jethro Tull fan mailing list in which we tried to decipher all these wonderful acoustic songs we loved. The sense of achievement was great, although I began to wear out my tapes after listening the same few seconds of song hundreds of times. Nothing remains of the mailing list apart from a retrospective newsgroup post which has been cannibalised by a lot of guitar tab aggregator site. To see this, try typing "Mark Bertenshaw" "Dun Ringil" into Google.

More recently, I have tried to learn a few more by using some of these guitar tab sites. But you have to be really careful, because a lot of the tabs are wrong, and this wrongness gets multiplied by the fact that the same tab gets reused with the same mistakes. The song I had recently tried was Life is a Long Song, possibly my all-time favourite song. However, it had cocked up the introduction. Thank God for the internet - I found a very nice clear version here.

After discovering Tull, I quickly got side-tracked by their connection to the folk/rock band Fairport Convention, and thus onto connected artists such as Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson. I became a fan of lot of 70s rock and prog bands, and a whole load of Hawkwind (although in retrospect, this may have been influenced by my Deep Abiding Love for the writings of Michael Moorcock). And for this I am very, very grateful.

Wednesday 11 November 2009

No Changing Rooms

I am forever told to get on and redecorate my house - mostly by women who look around with a mixture of incomprehension and disgust. I think I understand what they mean. It would be nice to not have a carpet in my living room which has inexplicable black patches on it; or get rid of the peeling patch of wallpaper. But basically, I'd rather not, because it is all such a hassle. Do you know how many books I would have to make homeless before getting at the walls? [Answer: too many.]

It is probably quite telling that the one bit of what you might call DIY I have done recently was not to strip down the nasty woodchip paper on the ceiling and replace it with magnolia, nor to retile my kitchen. Actually, it was to go mental with an electric drill, a good ten metres of copper cabling and many wireclips in the attempt to replace the sad, and possibly malfunctioning, cable that snaked along my hallway to my ADSL modem/router. Yes, my internet connection is very important [it took nearly two years to get BT to fix the real problem - but that is another story].

In turn, I have a lot of incomprehension at the sheer amount of time, money and effort put into doing up houses. And it's not just the madmen and madwomen shown to us on programs such as Property Ladder (now topically renamed Property Snakes and Ladders). I have friends who seriously think nothing of coming home from work, and immediately start grouting above the sink. It's bad enough having to do without useful rooms, like bathrooms, whilst you have the builders in; but it is far worse if you have to spend four hours of evening work for the next six weeks. I'd rather spend this time reading through my backlog, writing code, or playing my guitar.

And, whilst I am on this subject, don't get me started about conservatories. My house is a mid-80s build, with nice cavity wall insulation. Why on earth would you deliberately want to add yet another room that you'll have to heat, and which is less energy efficient than the rest of your house to boot? If I was going to dig up half my garden, I'd do something useful with it, like grow more potatoes, carrots and rhubarb.

So it was massively satisfying to me on Saturday, when I visited the house of a friend (who will remain nameless) for the first time, and I discovered that his house had remained in the same unimproved state for even longer than mine! The house had previously belonged to his grandmother, and walking through the front door was like falling through the Time Tunnel into an earlier age: the 1950s, possibly. I loved it: it had the original wallpaper, some of the original electrics, and original furniture. It even had old wooden armchairs with antimacassars (and that was the new word for that day).

However, in my heart, I know it cannot last. As a broken Winston Smith awaits his killing bullet, I await the time when the pressure finally breaks me, and I give in. I shall make a bonfire of my books, comics and clothes - my previous life dissipating into the finest of ash. For the first time, I will pass the threshold of B&Q or Wickes without reacting like Damien outside Guildford Cathedral. I will actively relish choosing the new shade of paint with my partner. I will enjoy the sensation of stripping wallpaper. I will sing with joy at the installation of my second bathroom. I will finally learn to love it all.

Current Obsessions: Part 3 - VB and C#

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN TECHIE STUFF

There is something I have been embarrassed to tell anyone. Even my close friends don't know the depths to which I have gone. Only one friend, somebody I met through role-playing, knows the sad truth, and he has good reason. He works for Microsoft. And I program using Microsoft Development tools.

It all started in 1994. After a bad time failing my Chemistry degree at Reading University, and instead learning about all sorts of exciting ways to hack Unix, I had ended up with not much other than the ability to make exciting reactions, and program in Modula 2, Ada, Fortran and Basic. It was the latter which saved me.

Whilst I had been brought up roughly knowing a smattering of BBC Basic, I applied myself properly at learning how to hack the QBasic bundled with the DOS 5 on my father's new PC. Responding to an advert, I got a job working for a small company in Surbiton, Perfect Software, which wrote accounts software for solicitors. My job was to convert the TurboBasic program that existed into a Visual Basic 3 program. This was an excellent way into the IT industry for someone who essentially had no paper qualifications. I also became a massive fan of everything Microsoft.

Visual Basic was probably the most popular development system in the world in the 90s. The language was easy to learn, allowed you to create a workable GUI in minutes, was forgiving of mistakes, and most importantly, provided an automated memory management system. In fact, most people didn't know that a memory management system existed. In many respects, this was its downfall. If you were a C/C++ programmer you had to understand what a pointer was; but the entry level for Visual Basic required little knowledge and understanding in comparison. So, on average, there were more bad VB programmers than any other kind. It must be true, because I have met so many, or rather, have cleaned up way too much of their shitty code.

Of course, I considered myself to be pretty hot stuff - in the VB world, you understand. I gained knowledge of how to use a lot of the internal Windows functionality that was glossed over by the nice, easy to use toolkit. I learned scary things like creating COM objects out of User Defined Types and using arrays to access arbitary memory locations. But still, I felt that there was something missing. Something that many people have labelled C++ Envy. This was a condition that caused many VB programmers to think that they were second class citizens when compared to Visual C++ programmers. Maybe this was because the documentation for Windows assumed you were writing in C or C++. Or that all the really hardcore applications seemed to come with the Visual C++ runtime library. Or that VB didn't support inheritance. Even when native code compilation appeared in VB 5, it still seemed so unfair!

At the end of the 90s, news came to the VB community that Microsoft was planning a new initiative which would bring VB up to parity with their C++ brethren. Visual Basic 7 would come with inheritance and other more advanced object features. They would share run-times and documentation with all Microsoft languages. Suddenly, VB programmers could hold their heads up high.

Unfortunately, it became apparent that it wasn't quite as simple as that. Microsoft, for many good technical and financial reasons, had designed a new virtual machine, the Common Language Runtime, and essentially twisted Visual Basic to fit in with this new model, called ".NET". It turned out that the new language was incompatible with the new language; and even if you used the VB6->VB.NET converter, a lot of the code still had to be rewritten.

There was a massive split in the VB community. Some people were happy to move to a new system which gave them new abilities and some advantages. Others were furious that they would have to rewrite their code without getting a lot in return. The arguments became quite personal and vitriolic. There are certainly people to this day who have not (and probably will not ever) forgive Microsoft.

As for myself, I eventually saw both points of view. But then again, I didn't personally own thousands of lines of production code to be rewritten. I would happily take the money, although rewriting code never seemed a particularly fascinating job. Of course, it eventually happened that I had to do just this. It was probably one of the most annoying experiences in my life, because the converter seemed not to understand whole chunks of my code. In the end, there was so much code to change, I took the plunge and went to rewrite the lot in C# instead.

When it was said that VB would have parity with other Microsoft languages, this hasn't been strictly true. It turns out that Microsoft's own language, C#, is actually more capable overall. It is now my language of choice. Like Java, it is descended from C++, and runs on a virtual machine. Unlike Java, it supports pointers and a greater number of value types. (See this article for a full comparison). The features I absolutely love are Generic Types, simplified enumerator objects, delegates, and with version 3, the amazing Linq sub-language.

Ironically, after all the fuss, it has been thanks to both VB.NET and C# working on the same platform which has made it so easy to jump ship to C#. I'll be surprised if there are ever as many VB.NET programmers as there used to be VB programmers.

Monday 9 November 2009

Current Obsessions: Part 2 - Comics

Surprisingly for me, I was a late entrant into the wonderful world of comics, and their brothers in bondage, graphic novels. I think I must have been in my late 20s, when I gradually became aware of the very popular Sandman comic. I had heard whispers of the qualities of this series, and how cool its writer was. This didn't connect with me until I went to a signing in Kingston's original Waterstones, where the extremely popular comedy writer, Terry Pratchett was signing his new book. Except that he had actually co-written the book with a pleasant man in black called Neil Gaiman, who sounded familiar. There was a massive queue of people ready to chat to Terry (who is one of the nicest writers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting), but nobody seemed to be conversing with Neil Gaiman, sitting right next to him. Feeling sorry for him, I made light conversation about the book "Good Omens". During this, I remembered that he was the writer of Sandman, so I told him how cool Sandman, despite having never read it.

This lingered with me, and I felt a little bad about this little white lie. I read Good Omens, and thought it was utterly brilliant, and maybe this Gaiman fellow was worth taking a punt with. I got the original "Sandman" graphic novel, which was actually issues 8-16, and found it riveting. I loved not just Gaiman's flowing narrative and love of stories, but I also thought the art was excellent. As each graphic novel got released, I eagerly picked them up. Through the name of Gaiman, I got into Books of Magic; from this I learnt about the English Magus, John Constantine; then I found out about the amazing Alan Moore run of Swamp Thing. At this point, I discovered the comics department of Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street, and I found that there was a whole world out there that I had never heard of. I picked up the Sword of Azrael graphic novel, because it looked so cool, and started buying the ongoing series through the NoMans Land storyline. When Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker were brought in as the new regular writers (and the covers were redesigned as "New Gotham"), I jumped on board, and became a fan of the Batman family of titles. From here, there was no going back. I had become a superhero fan, and there was no saving me from the shared universe concept. To be fair, I also briefly flirted with Grant Morrison's "New X-Men", and Greg Rucka's excellent Queen and Country series. However, to this day I remain a DC Fanboy, and there's no escape.

The REAL Wall

My fantastic partner Julie, who works at Roehampton University, came back a few days ago talking about a really nice guy she works with, Andy Hoang, who had been having a lot of hassles - thanks to his blog, of all things. His REAL wall is a replacement for the unreal Wall on his previous Facebook account, now abandoned (you can never really delete the bugger - just blank out all your fields). I hate, loathe and despise Facebook, so he was already winning in my book. His idea is for people to send him postcards and letters by REAL mail, and he regularly photographs the current REAL wall and posts it on the blog. I love this idea: it ends up being far more personal than any number of so-called social networking sites, and feels far more authentic, probably because it is ever so slightly messy.

Now all this is great: he gets hundreds of pieces of mail regularly sent to him, and everybody's happy. Everybody, except Hammersmith and Fulham council, who spookily find out (somehow) that he has been sent all this mail, and bizarrely conclude from this that he is running some sort of business from Goldhawk Road. The next thing he knows, he has received a £5000 bill from the council to pay for the disposal of his dangerous festering piles of card and paper.

This is all very silly, and I just can't believe that with the fuss and reaction to this already, they won't back down. However, it's just worth being sure. I would ask anybody who thinks that this is bleeding outrageous to help out and send a postcard, or even a sanely written letter for Andy to pass on to the council.

Current Obsessions: Part 1 - Boardgames

In the last ten or so years, I have become aware of the large number of very good boardgames out there which have been released, but which are seen nowhere except in a small number of niche shops which specialise in them. Like many people, I had been through the classics, such as Monopoly and Cluedo. However, I was lucky that my father's family had been keen boardgamers, and had less well known games, such as Careers, Totopoly and Taxi. My father seemed to have gone through a phase where he had bought such games as Othello, Campaign and even the notorious Diplomacy, although I suspect he has never played the latter. All of these were played aside the kind of games you normally find in toy shops.

I went through a phase when I got into role playing games, and board games were something which I wouldn't have afforded, even though Talisman looked exceptionally cool. It wasn't until I discovered the web site which I am linking to throughout this article, The Boardgame Geek (http://www.boardgamegeek.com), and became introduced to a new world of games that I never knew existed. These range from the beautiful simple railway game Ticket to Ride and the tile landscape generating Carcassonne, through the simple in concept - more complicated in play Settlers of Catan, up to highly dice-free tilefests like Caylus.

The main problem with all this is finding the time to play them. The main problem is to get people together in a room long enough to finish one of them. Yesterday, I got the chance to play the rather exciting Battlestar Galactica Boardgame. This is based on the excellent recent SciFi Channel (don't get me started about their stupid name change) drama, reimagined from the tired mediocre offering from the late 70s.

Sadly, only my two friends Paul and Katy were available for the initial play, but we quickly got sucked into the game. The game cleverly replicates the paranoia in the original program, because nobody can be absolutely sure whether a player is a Cylon, working against humanity. At the beginning, everyone maybe intent on saving humanity from annihilation, but by the end a sleeper Cylon could be activated. Maybe the last crisis occurred because of bad luck. Maybe it was someone else on the table causing it; maybe it was you.

As it happened, I played Admiral Adama, only be stripped of my rank by my ungrateful son, Apollo. Whilst I believed I was human, halfway through the game, everyone's suspicions were confirmed when I thought it would be a jolly good idea to stage a coup d'etat. I failed miserably, but when Apollo was out fighting the Cylon Raiders, and Starbuck was happy in the dual role of President and Admiral on Colonial One, I revealed my inner Cyclon, and sent Starbuck into the brig, and went onto wreck havoc on the human fleet leaving them cold in space, with no fuel left. Tragically for them, they were two turns from jumping to the safety of Kobol.

All great fun.

Tomorrow: another obsession (TBA)