failmaster

Being an uncultured, knuckle-dragging troglodyte with no sense of how his own life fits into the grand scheme of history has the unexpected advantage that I can still see Shakespeare plays without knowing a priori how they are going to end. Tonight I spent a very pleasant evening sitting on the grass at the open-air theatre in Rowntree Park enjoying a picnic in good company watching the above-mentioned Bardic work.

The performance was polished and it's impressive how many of the jokes are still funny 400 years after they were penned, but I did find myself a little disappointed at how easily the 'shrew' was tamed, and bemused at how readily Baptista accepts the fact he has been lied to and deceived into allowing Bianca to marry someone who is, to him, a complete stranger.

Anyway, the pervading moral of the story seems to be: Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen.

There were a few "technical difficulties" at the weekend in making the DIY clarinet produce non goose-being-eaten-by-walrus type noises (I think the mouthpiece subtly changed shape between putting it down on Thursday evening and picking it up on Friday evening). This was rectified by some sanding and re-shaping of the mouthpiece, followed by a crash-course in clarinet embouchure technique. You can hear the result here (provided you can play MP3s - and let's face it, who can't!).

You'll have to excuse the poor playing technique. For the record, being in tune was never a design goal, however sounding a bit like a clarinet was (an in that regard I'm quite pleased with the results!)

Construction details to follow in a few days, for the morbidly curious... =)

Well, the sourdough experiment went okay (in as much as I didn't poison myself). The loaf rose, but it didn't really have that distinctive sourdough flavour, and (as a friend so eloquently put it) was a bit of a duck-sinker. =)

Still, they say sourdough starter improves with age. I'll have to put that to the test - the jar in the fridge certainly has a much stronger smell now than it did when I baked this.

( For people who like looking at photos of loaves. )

Some of you may remember that in February last year I was attempting to build myself an octave mandola. In the end it didn't ( go entirely to plan... )

Following a conversation with a Finn a couple of weeks ago on the nature of Real Bread™ and how all we seem to have in the UK is Tesco Value Bread-Like Product™ I decided to take up the gauntlet and see if I could make sourdough rye bread (the afore-mentioned Real Bread™). So after some reading up on the art and science of sourdough I bought myself some rye flour and set to work making sourdough starter.

For those who don't know, sourdough starter is a frothy gloopy mess riddled with germs and fungus that is necessary to make sourdough. One would ideally prefer it if the fungus were some kind of natural yeast (which is present in all flour, and moreso in rye than in wheat), and the germs an assortment of strains of acidophile bacterium that are symbiotic with the yeast, rather than, for example, Clostridium botulinum. The recipe for this biological-weapon precursor is as follows:

Ingredients
two tablespoons flour.
two tablespoons water.

Method
Place ingredients in a wide-mouthed frog jar. Stir. Cover loosely. Leave at room temperature for two days, feeding with another spoonful of flour and water once per day. When it starts to go frothy or bubbly, smell it: if it smells yeasty and a bit sour put it in the fridge and feed once per week; if it smells mouldy and a bit rotten, put it in the bin and start again.

In the end I got something that smells a bit beery, so decided to risk it. Incidentally, the aroma of this glutinous goo caused one hundred thousand years of human social development to crystalise before my very eyes. It goes like this:

1. You're bored: crush some grass seeds between two heavy stones to see what happens.
2. You get some off-white powder that doesn't taste very nice. And it's started to rain.
3. Go back to your cave and do something more interesting.
4. Remember the soggy stuff you left under a rock a couple of days ago.
5. Go back to check.

Congratulations! You've invented bread-making and brewing, and in doing so have laid the corner-stones of modern western society.

Anyway, enough of my forays into social anthropology: back to bread-making. With the addition of a bunch more rye flour and water (plus a dash of olive oil) I have a big lump of sticky, brown, rather umm... "robust" dough. That needs to sit around for another day or so while the yeast causes it to rise (the yeast in the starter is wussy natural yeast, and not the Arnold Schwartzenegger yeast you use for more mainstream baking duties) and the bacteria hopefully break some of that weapons-grade roughage down into something digestible by more of the animal kingdom than just cows, imparting the distinctive sour taste in the process.

I will let you know how things proceed (provided I don't die from eating the first slice!). ;)

This evening, to make a statement about what a corrupt and decadent society we live in, I am posting to livejournal from my bath.

That is all.

We have known each other for a very long time now, and as you know I am very tolerant of all your little 'foibles'. I endured frames without flinching. As an inveterate Linux user I tolerated messages like "please upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer" in lieu of content during the Browser Wars, and during the rise of Flash-based 'enhanced content' I put up with corporate eye-sores that danced around my screen before crashing my browser, due at least in part to early versions of Linux flash-player being the country-bumpkin cousin of its Windows counterpart.

In fact it is about this latter subject that I am writing to you. These days Flash is actually making a positive contribution to my internet exerperience (which, like buying a computer with Linux pre-installed from a big-name high-street retailer, was a something I never thought I would experience!). This is largely due to the novelty of "ooh look, we've got better animation than a GIF" finally wearing off, and the advent of embedded Flash media players giving access to a plethora of music and video content from the comfort of my own browser. Unfortunately, my joy is tempered somewhat by the recent upsurge in Flash-based advertisements.

Now, let's just clear one thing up: I have never resented your love of advertising and the revenue that goes along with it - we all have to make a living somehow after all. If I'm not interested in the adverts (and I'm usually not), then I can read the content between them, and that's fine by me. What I do object to however, is getting a screenful of video adverts, with sound, all playing at the same time, hogging my computer's meagre CPU power and preventing me from viewing the amusing video, listening to the music, or playing the online Flash game that I originally came to the web-page to see. It is this development that has finally driven me to install a Flash blocker so that I get to choose which elements of a web-page gain access to my limited CPU cycles and, in particular, my sound-card! Your traditional text- and image-based adverts will continue to be displayed unmolested.

I hope this doesn't affect our ongoing professional relationship, and I look forward to working with you for another fifteen years.

Yours Faithfully,


Mr Failmaster

I was walking home from the convenience store at about 10:30 this evening (having gone on a late night jaunt to buy some pepperoni and take further advantage of the 2-for-£4 offer on Innocent smoothie) when I saw a flickery orange light in the sky (resembling a firework ember, but lasting much longer), roughly over the river. As I watched it followed a fairly erratic path but with an overall drift southwards towards Fulford. It was still visible from an upstairs window after I reached the house, dumped my stuff in the kitchen and went up to attic to look for it. I watched it for another couple of minutes before it either faded to nothing or disappeared into a cloud (impossible to say which). All told I tracked it for between five and ten minutes, but my mobile phone camera wasn't good enough at night photography to get a picture.

My best guess as to the nature of the phenomenon is ball lightning (although I'm led to believe that normally - but not always - accompanies a thunderstorm. Other theories are welcome.

Edit: given the weather conditions and York's large Chinese population, a sky lantern would seem to be a better explanation - thanks to phil99 and clarisinda for suggesting them (and indeed for introducing me to the concept. In my professional capacity as a pyromaniactechnician I may have to investigate the possibility of acquiring some of those! :)

In a desperate bid to avoid having three years of journal posts on the front page of my LJ, here are my ( musings on learning a language... )

Building proceeds apace... I've now got something that bears a passing resemblance to part of a musical instrument!

( Photos behind the cut... )

The next big tasks are a) to beg, borrow or steal a jig-saw and cut out the neck and peg-head, and b) to reinforce the sides and glue them to the back. Watch this space.

As some of you will be aware, I've been saying for some time now that I'm going to build myself an octave mandola (it's kind of like a big mandolin). Well, I've finally started...

( ...so here are some pictures )

No mere virus is a match for a digestive system reared on my mum's cooking!

Well, my colon is a happier place than it was this time yesterday, but I still feel like I've gone five rounds boxing with a steamroller.

Don't do it, kids - it's bad!

I've just had a f-list prune and lopped off about a dozen of you. Please don't take offence if you were a victim - I'm just trying to get my friends page small enough that I might actually read it once in a while. If you got the chop (or even if you haven't!) and are as a result mortally offended, leave a comment and I'll re-add you. Or maybe just point and laugh. Or maybe both.

I was in Oxford at the weekend, where I did a lot of thinking. What follows is the result (mostly for my own benefit)...

Consider the following two statements:

* I am idle.
* I procrastinate.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have been locked in a long-running battle to change these two aspects my personality, based on the premise that these are wholly negative traits that are holding me back.

My insight is that, far from being detrimental, these are powerful and positive factors that I can utilise to get things done if I just stop wasting so much time trying to change them!

Idleness and procrastination have always been two core components of who I am - I like to do as little work as possible, and I daydream a lot, but thinking back over those (rare!) occasions when I was at my most productive I realised that, paradoxically, idleness and procrastination were my primary motivating forces.

Let me illustrate with an example: I once had a temping assignment where I was supposed to input large quantities of computer-generated data into Excel on a different computer for subsequent analysis. This would have been a lot of work, so instead I taught myself to program in Visual Basic to the point where I was able to automate the data-entry process. Instead of taking all day to painstakingly enter data manually, my job was reduced to the click of a button and took some small fraction of second to complete. I was then able to spend the rest of my 'working' day doing more important things like planning roleplaying games, writing short stories and chatting on Monochrome.

Taking this train of thought a step further I realised that I have an incredible flair for bodging solutions to problems out of next-to-nothing. When I try to do things properly they don't get finished - I simply don't have the attention span for perfection - but I can cobble-together something serviceable in no time at all.

The real productivity killer isn't my laziness at all, but the un-natural obsession I've developed with propriety and doing things 'the right way'. Does it really matter that my world is held together by string and bent paper-clips, as long as it all works as intended?

The point is that I shouldn't be trying to change myself to fit some preconception of how work ought to be done, but rather playing on my existing strengths: instead of forcing myself to do things 'properly' I should be redefining my tasks to require the least work possible.

I've just discovered that the company that owns LJ has a member of senior management called Andrew Anker!

Don't believe me? See for yourself:

http://www.sixapart.com/about/management

He's the fourth one down, after (the almost-as-hilariously named) Barak Berkowitz, Mena Trott and (the slightly disappointing) Ben Trott.

Is anyone else feeling anarchistic and/or infantile enough to help me propagate this around LJ? :)

Dalek Porn!

That is all.

Sporulation! Finally!

Oops I bought a mandolin!