MaW’s Blog

From this Cinescape article…

“HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE sees a Quidditch World Cup held at Hogwarts”

If the Quidditch World Cup was at Hogwarts, I’m a fifty-stone gorilla.

Oh look, it snowed.

And then it snowed again, snow like I’ve never seen it before. Can’t see very far in snow like that. Good thing the office is nice and warm really.

I have to admit to some small (read large) amount of amusement at the instant rush out of the building which ensued. I’m sure some people have good reasons for it, but ultimately most of them are still sitting in their cars having not yet made it around the first corner.

Weekends are such fragile things. Whilst fairly clearly defined in my life at the moment as the time from leaving work on a Friday to going to bed on a Sunday, they take on a quality all of their own. ‘I’ll do it at the weekend’ becomes a common thought, and of course it inevitably results in weekends having far too much to do, leaving apparently no room for spontaneity in what I do during them.

No such thing, actually happens. The plan this weekend was to go and see Richard and fit his CD-RW drive. That bit went off okay. The plan was also to write some of my uk100k novel and try and get some of it into a state whereby I could upload it and show that I’m not quite as inept an author as people might think (or rather, as I might portray myself to be - although I might be that inept, I don’t know).

This weekend’s plan disruptor came in the form of a telephone call. These things often do — either that or a message transmitted at the inconvenience of large numbers of electrons over the marvellous thing which we term the Internet. But this weekend it was a telephone call. The instigator of this telephone call is, occasionally confusingly, also named Matt, and the upshot of it all was that on Saturday night a policeman came to the door and took me away.

I’ll hasten to add that he was an off duty policeman, and we were going nowhere more sinister than his house, where much cat-stroking, games playing and DVD-watching were on the agenda.

So now I’m back, since Matt’s working nights, and thinking about getting on with what I originally planned for the weekend. But I’m blogging instead. How useful is that, eh?

Oh, and I found out that Katie Melua’s first UK tour includes a gig at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, so I’m going to go see her. Anybody want to come with me?

I miss Matt’s cat already.

I’ve been ploughing forward fairly heedless of things recently. I’ve not blogged much, I’ve not really spent much time on IRC or anything like that either. My days are split between work and not-work, and not-work is largely consisting of sleeping, eating and procrastinating. Must stop that.

Occasionally I get off my behind and do something though (and sometimes I even get on my behind in order to do something, but this doesn’t usually involve a physical change of position, unless swinging the chair around to face a different computer counts). Recently I’ve been working on getting Towel ready for a 0.3.0 release, which I think is fairly close now. Various UI improvements, bugfixes and vastly better file metadata support. I even have some extra features planned for 0.4! Hopefully no 0.3.1 will be required in the mean time. Towel’s also got an autoconf build system now, so I should be able to write an ebuild for it without too much trouble. That’s one of the things on the list for 0.3, although it can be written just after the release as it’s not really actually a part of it. I wonder if I can get anyone to try the ebuild…

In other things, I’ve also been working on version 3 of The Westlands Tower. In case anybody doesn’t know what this is, it’s a Wheel of Time-based roleplaying site, where roleplaying is in the form of collaborative fiction rather than D&D-style dice rolls, skill points etc. It’s also known as ‘free-form’ roleplaying, and basically consists of people using some kind of forum-like system to gradually expand a tale by writing segments of it from their own character’s point of view. I’m looking forward to having Westlands v3 up and running, so I can put some energy into roleplaying again. My copy of ‘A New Spring’, which is the first of three prequel novels to Wheel of Time, arrived yesterday and I’ve been reading it avidly. It certainly has more information about the White Tower that we didn’t have before, and of critical importance to a site like Westlands is the format of the test for Aes Sedai, and the raising ceremony which follows, along with some inside info on the Blue Ajah. All good stuff, although it’s weird seeing scenes written from Lan’s point of view. I don’t think he has any viewpoint scenes at all in the main series. Very much looking forward to the next two prequels, and the final two novels in the main series of course!

What else? Ah yes. I’ve started regular Tai Chi classes again, having finally found and contacted a local Yang style class who do probably the closest to the variant of the Beijing 24 form that I’m going to find outside Universe Tai Chi. Some of it feels very weird, but it definitely feels like Tai Chi as I want to do it, which the Taoist style never did. I feel all relaxed and glowing for a day or so after the classes now, although it wears off quicker depending on what work’s like. Tempting to start doing Chi Kung in the mornings.

Recent activities: h2g2 London meet, Cambridge Pagan Moot, finally finding what looks to be a good Tai Chi class

Current projects: writing ‘Equisistance’ and my uk100k novel, adding man page output to Haddock, looking at filling in some of the gaps in the gtkmm documentation, working on Towel, trying to get the freedesktop.org X server to compile

Soundtrack: Loreena McKennitt. Again.