MaW’s Blog

I’m in this week’s Perl 6 Summary — in the perl6-language section, under ‘Hyper mutating methods’.

This pointless blog entry was brought to you by my ego.

On Monday my iPod came. For those of you who care, it’s a 20GB model, brand new, and very nice indeed. About 2.5GB used at the moment — not enough good music around for me to put on it. Plus I don’t have room to keep all the CDs I’d need to get that much music. Perhaps if I start encoding it using Apple Lossless instead of AAC… probably it would fill up too quickly then.

I guess the iPod doesn’t have to be full.

On Tuesday morning I got out of the shower and pulled a muscle or two in my shoulder. I have no idea how, but it just happened and it hurt quite a lot. Most things involving arms became painful — including typing and cycling, so work was right out. I was able to get online again by the afternoon but only through some strange positioning and the use of my laptop, so I didn’t get much done. My iPod was very useful that day.

Back to work on Wednesday thanks to Mum giving me a lift and Nigel giving me a lift home (Nigel my boss, that is). Nana had an operation on Wednesday as well, so it was a bit of a nervous day (although I was tanked up on ibuprofen, wonderful stuff).

Today we had champagne at work, but no sign of the usual Internet outage which accompanies such celebrations. Have we finally seen the last of the frequent outages? Time shall tell. I hope so, or the VoIP phone system we’ve just installed won’t go down very well. Some parts of it aren’t going down well anyway, as the client software to run on Windows or Mac OS X is absolutely dreadful. I don’t think I could write a piece of software that was less usable if I tried for a year. It’s so bad it feels offensive to run it on a Mac, and even on Windows it looks dreadful — a platform not really noted for any sense of UI consistency on the side of the software vendors.

Needless to say we’re trying to get the source code or the network protocol so we can write our own version. We’ve got enough knowledge and raw talent (what with being a company providing products based around large and complex bits of bespoke software) that we can probably come up with something better. Goodness knows it would be difficult to come up with anything worse.

Appraisal tomorrow. Nottingham and Matt’s at the weekend. My birthday is on Saturday.

Nana, thankfully, is doing well after her operation, given her age and what they had to do to her insides. Fingers crossed that she continues to do so.

So on Tuesday Tai Chi resumed after a two-week hiatus due to the school easter holiday. Resumed might be the wrong word actually, as the whole class schedule is organised around the school terms, so really it was a new course starting on Tuesday night. That course is Tai Chi Broadsword, and I went along with great enthusiasm.

Having done a longsword form before I am extremely interested in other weapons forms — broadsword, staff, fan etc. so this is a perfect opportunity to learn another one. It’s a class for people who’ve got some Tai Chi experience, so it doesn’t painstakingly cover all the basics repeatedly, which is really good. Of course, we do have to learn the basics of broadsword, including numerous exercises, but they’re all interesting and good. The Chinese broadsword is a wide, curved weapon sharp on the outer edge of the curve, and is also known as the sabre. This lends it to many flowing, curving movements, reinforcing the Tai Chi concepts of spiralling in to and out from the centre.

So we did lots of exercises, then a lot of partner work, which is something quite rare in Tai Chi weapons training these days, but definitely worthwhile with the broadsword, then we looked at the start of the form. What a joy it was to be able to do more than the very early moves and have everyone keep up with them!

I’m not sure if everyone will remember them by next Tuesday, but then human memory does perform badly unless refreshed often. Anyone ever see those charts they give you at school around revision time, where they show how recall is affected by periodic review of material? Quite amazing really — and from my experience, it’s true as well. So I’ve been going over the opening moves of the form in my head, and so far I can remember it. Not all the subtle details of course, because we haven’t covered all the subtle details yet.

In similar news, I also managed to remember the entire longsword form I learned at Uni after the broadsword class, which was nice because I tried it before the class and couldn’t get past the move that’s either black dragon spreads its wings, or blue dragon emerges from the water. Never did learn the move names properly for that form.

Time to go to work now.

I’ve just seen Bowling for Columbine. If you haven’t seen it, get a copy and see it right now. I’m not quite sure what to say about it, because I’m not really sure how I feel about all the issues it raised.

One thing I am certain about though — it’s not raised my opinion of the USA one iota. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think I’ll stick to Europe for the time being.

Lots of people don’t blog often enough for my liking. Alex does most of the time, but Alex doesn’t and neither do Graham and Chris and Carl and most certainly not Ross or Rob. Blogs are an excellent (supposedly) way to keep up with what people are doing, and stave off the help-me-I’m-sinking-in-Cambridge kind of feeling I get sometimes.

Not that I’d feel any better in Nottingham perhaps, but at least I’d be able to go to Wagamama whenever I wanted. Come on, build one in Cambridge! Must go to Dojo, see if it’s an acceptable substitute.

Back to people who don’t blog often enough: I don’t either. Nigel has reminded me of this on numerous occasions, but since he doesn’t blog at all her’s perhaps not in so much of a position to comment. I know he could have a blog if he wanted one, I’ll even host it here for you if your server’s too full for it, Nigel. I’m sure nobody else on wonky would mind.

So I need to get back into blogging more often. Perhaps that’s a good thing to do just about now, I don’t know.
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