shadows of echoes of memories of songs

I kind of accidentally bought a Nokia N95 on eBay, as you do. It was locked to Vodafone, but I thought phone unlocking was fairly easy and cheap these days. (I'm down with the kids, me.)

( in which our Heroine learns the Perils of Careless Internet Shopping, and makes a Friend )

Now I just have to work out how to get the phone to make friends with the internet...

Four letters signed and sealed and ready to be posted:

• to A-Plan, saying that I'm not renewing my insurance but that I'd happily recommend them to anybody who wanted car insurance (consider it done!)

• to the DVLA, containing my logbook

• to a different tentacle arm of the DVLA, applying for three months' refund on my tax disc (amazingly, you can print out the form yourself)

• to Vale of the White Horse District Council, returning my parking permit and asking them to reconsider their car-registration-limited-permit policy to allow car-sharers and occasional car-hirers to use the parking space to which car ownership would entitle them.

The car has gone to a better place (that is, a better place than the previous one) and we have FINALLY joined the ranks of the car-free*.

That's a) an annual saving of approximately £550, not counting petrol or the (increasingly crippling) cost of getting the damn things fixed all the time; b) a win on the carbon footprint front (less temptation to drive, not that I have really had any for about 2 years, & if I do drive a hire-car it'll undoubtedly be more efficient than the old bangers I have been driving), and c) a great weight off my mind.

* not counting pto452

A couple of people asked for a photo of my new glasses. Coincidentally, these photos feature my new glasses. (SFW, but silly.)

Merry Christmas to all of you and anybody else who's reading! (And if you don't celebrate Christmas, then I hope you're having a good time whatever you're up to anyway.)

By leaving the camera on timelapse overnight I managed to capture a blurry image of one of Santa's little helpers putting presents under the tree:



Okay, I confess, it's actually one of these elves. My sister and I decorated the tree on Sunday night, covering it with lights and tinsel and baubles and icicles and angels and robins and my mum's folded-paper stars and all kinds of silly things until it bent sideways under the weight. Then last night I got back from drinks with schoolfriends at quarter to midnight and everybody had already gone to bed, so I could play Santa in peace, putting my presents for everybody under the tree



and hiding tiny presents in amongst the branches of the tree so people would find them when they thought they'd already opened everything. Though my sister totally beat me at that game, having bought me heaps and heaps of cool things so that I was still finding more presents on the tree after everybody else had opened everything. Heh heh.

Since then we have also had Christmas lunch, which isn't like your Christmas lunch (probably) because tea is the big meal here (and it's veggie -- I think this year we're having some sort of fancy chestnut and mushroom pastry thing) so for lunch we have breads and cheese and pâtés and olives and MOAR CHEESE and smoked salmon and and and om nom nom.

We've also been pottering around on the internets, four Mac powerbooks and a USB Christmas tree all glowing away happily:



The internet is very useful: http://www.isitchristmas.com/ :-)

Enjoy the rest of the day!

Other things I am stressed about:

- my job
- my relationship

Clearly the answer is to resign from my job and go and live in a mountain hut somewhere on my own. I wouldn't need a car to get from one goat-track to another. And I suppose at the top of a mountain I might at least get a decent night's sleep.

Last day of November!

"I've been trying to write a blog post every day this month," I said, in the pub, earlier.
"Doesn't that mean you just end up writing a load of crap?" asked my learned colleague.

He had a point; I've published things I wouldn't have published (which was part of the point), and had a go at things which didn't really work (which was another part of the point). I've also got round to writing some things that I might not otherwise have got round to (ditto), and maybe some of them are crap too. The main result, though, is having started getting back into the habit of writing. And along the way I've had far more positive feedback than I expected, and I'm afraid I've failed to reply to a lot of comments that really did deserve a reply.

I've let other things slide, too. The photography is so far behind schedule that I don't know if I'm going to manage to do my end-of-course assessment at all. It's not helped by the fact that I have approximately one hour of daylight free in a normal working day, and when it's dark outside there's no sensible light in the house (a combination of badly-positioned lights and energy-saving bulbs means that it always feels too murky to see anything properly, let alone photograph anything properly, like I'm looking through a very thin veil). I don't think that makes the course a waste of money, if I don't hand the ECA in; I think I got what I wanted out of it. (It'll probably disqualify me from ever taking another OU degree, of course, and they'll send me hundreds of letters asking why I FAILED FAILED FAILED, but I can probably live with that.)

But I've still managed to read interesting books, and sing in one carol service and one carol concert, and sing at a colleague's leaving do, and go running twice, and play piano a couple of times, in between all this actually get some work done (though I've felt fairly unproductive lately, to be honest, and maybe that's the next thing to try to kick-start, and I have some ideas for that too).

I don't think it means anything or proves anything or achieves anything in the grand scheme of things. But sometimes it's good just to know that you can carry on putting one brick upon another, one foot in front of the other, even if it's not clear what you're building or where you're going.

Oxford Geek Night 4 was another excellent evening of tech talks organised by the Torchbox team.

The top keynote was Tom Steinberg from MySociety (who do cool things like They Work For You and FixMyStreet, and are embarking on Groups Near You -- sign up now!) speaking on 'saving the world one perl module at a time' -- he admitted the title was facetious but then went on to prove that actually, joking aside, he is making a difference, getting people involved and engaged and joined up in the way that the webtopian future was always meant to, back in the days when we dreamed big dreams instead of sticking misspelled text on kittens.

Next came James Gardner talking about Pylons, which probably should be the Next Big Thing in the way that Ruby on Rails was back in the dark ages (about 10 minutes ago). Never having really a) done any Python or b) used proper web frameworks, I wasn't expecting to follow much of this; but James made it seem surprisingly clear, and also very cool.

The 5-minute microslots were all good, covering various aspects of the social and semantic web; microformats and nanoformats (how small can these things get?); the cardinal rules of web security; fun stuff on Google Earth from Google Sightseeing.com; and MythTV, which I'd probably think was quite cool if I actually watched TV (though the presentation was subtitled "record everything, watch nothing"). Overall the programme was eclectic, entertaining and intelligent: all the things we've come to expect from Geek Nights.

Of course, it doesn't do any harm that the Geek Nights are in a good pub and there's (a limited amount of) free drinks provided by (the one website I can't imagine needing to link to) Google. This time there was also a prize draw to win some cool geek books, which was extremely well-organised and completely fair (I say this because I won a book, optimistically choosing a fully buzzword-compliant book that I fear I may never get round to reading).

It's always a shame that there isn't room to fit more stuff into one evening; fortunately the Oxford Geeks are developing a workaround for this, and planning a BarCamp in Oxford next year. A whole day's Geek Night!

This post is written in the length of time it takes to play two different recordings of Tallis's Spem in Alium: the first by the Clerkes of Oxenford, the second by the Winchester Cathedral Choir.

Spem in Alium is a 40-part motet: forty separate vocal lines (eight choirs of five lines each). Sometimes the voices imitate each other, interweaving so seamlessly that it's impossible to pick one line and follow it. Sometimes they move together in vast and glorious chords, vast but not burdensome; it's as if the music is poised en pointe in a moment that seems endless, suspended in space and time, before spinning into the dance once more.

If you are a singer, and you ever get a chance to sing in it, grab that chance with both hands. To sing it is to stand in the middle of a work of creation or evolution: to see galaxies form and grow and blossom into slow-motion supernovas, finally stabilising in a rich, harmonious universe. In the beginning is the word, and the word is hope, and everything grows from that: one single note, two notes meeting in a bare yet perfect fifth, and from then on an exponential unfurling into complexity and majesty.

And to listen? To listen is to stand on the sidelines and to realise, with a growing sense of wonder, that the sidelines are also the middle; that you are the point at which the interweaving melodies converge; that you are both a part of the creation and its purpose; that you are the still point of the turning world.

I've been thinking a lot about age recently; feeling young, feeling old, how it's all relative. Obvious stuff, but I'm getting to the sort of age where I'm allowed to ramble off down memory lane from time to time, so bear with me (or just move on). ( age )

The things you can't remember always seem more significant than the things you can. The things you can't remember, they seem significant; they'd put you in a different class of people, a different zone, a different level of experience. But the things you can remember, you know that you didn't do anything special, you weren't singled out, you just happened to be there, watching, breathing.

[This is an experiment in blogging techniques. - Ed.]

Um... so what are we going to do? You're not typing that in, are you? You meanie!

*slurp*

*heh, heh*

Yes. Okay, um, as most of you know I tend to end up doing lots of different things at once a lot of the time. Um. Owen will tell you that I've got fifty or sixty tabs open in Firefox at any one time and I'm switching between screens every couple of seconds.

I committed to doing this blog post a day at the beginning of November and you might not think there are many things you can do at the same time as blogging but fortunately my amanuensis -- or maybe it should be awomanuensis -- can type for me while I'm doing other things, which I probably shouldn't write about on this blog, because it might spoil the surprise for someone who's unlikely to be reading this but it's possible.

Ironically for someone who talks so much I'm not very good at speaking off the cuff.

This really isn't going to work.

Um, is this thing still switched on?

Are you putting that bit in? You've got to put your own things in. Not fair otherwise. I really don't know what to say now.

It keeps doing that. Don't know why. Can't do a 'B'. Don't put that in, it won't mean anything out of context.

I think this is a failed experiment, actually, dude.