Random Transient Noise Bursts with Announcements

It's good to know I'm not the only one

2009-09-14T00:15:58Z

It's always good to find that other people are mad in just the same way as you are. I was going to do a bit of photoshopping involving District 9 and Dr. Zoidberg, but I found this so didn't have to.

District 9

2009-09-09T09:31:33Z

Anybody fancy seeing this tonight?

NewCon 5

2009-09-06T13:49:03Z

Apparently NewCon 5 is back in business. No news on the venue yet but apparently the dates will be 9th–10th October 2010.

It's so clever I want to claw my eyes out.

2009-09-01T11:07:16Z

So OS X 10.6 introduces lots of stuff to do with compressed files but Apple want to prevent things going horribly wrong if you do things with those files on an older version of OS X, and they don't want to make the volume the file is on unreadable. So large compressed files are stored in the resource fork, and small compressed files are stored in an extended attribute. Move or copy the files using an older version of the OS and everything will work without a hitch even though you won't be able to view their contents.

Clever, but it still makes me shudder slightly.

Presumably they won't need to pull such tricks if they ever move over to zfs as that won't have to maintain compatibility with older version of OS X.

That's a bingo!

2009-08-26T09:38:25Z

Right, I'm going to go and see Inglorious Basterds at the Arts tonight at 20:30.

Anybody else want to come and want me to book tickets for them?

Inglorious Basterds

2009-08-25T13:36:09Z

Anybody else not seen this yet and want to?

Trains, Parks, Planes, & Screwdrivers.

2009-08-24T20:54:34Z

Train from Whistler down to Vancouver was nice, though not as spectacular as the one to Whistler. I should have done stuff in Vancouver on the Saturday night, I had a recommendation for a bar and things but frankly I was just all holidayed out by that point. Spent Sunday morning going for a long wander round Stanley Park which is lovely on a sunny day. Then off to the airport for my flight back home.

Fast bag drop was anything but, in fact it was so not fast that they got everyone for our flight out of the queue and put us through the Club World check-in instead (sadly they didn't upgrade us to match). Vancouver seems even more paranoid about security than Heathrow, I had to put my boots through the x-ray machine, and they confiscated my glasses repair screwdrivers which I had forgotten were in my bag and which had made it across the Atlantic the other way without being noticed.

The flight itself was slightly frustrating, the Italian couple in my row had filled up the entire overhead locker with their hand luggage before I got to my seat, so I had to hurriedly split mine into a bag of books that would just fit in there and laptop etc. that could go under my seat. Then I discovered my touch screen didn't respond to presses on the right hand side, and occasionally generated them randomly. This was fine as long as you never used the on screen menu, if you did then the film would start fast forwarding or rewinding, or doing something and there was no way to get it to stop. Once I'd worked out how to drive everything from the armrest then things were fine, though I did have to ask the man next to me not to put his elbow on my controls because then even more weird stuff happened.

By the time I could actually watch anything I think my judgement must have gone because X-Men Origins: Wolverine didn't seem nearly as bad as people had said it was.

I feel slightly guilty now about being awkward with the Italian couple at the start because just before landing one of the attendants opened the overhead locker and my bag of books immediately fell out and hit the wife on her head. Oh well, these things will happen I suppose.

Whistler.

2009-08-22T00:52:05Z

So Whistler. It's bigger and more upmarket touristy than Jasper, and doesn't produce nearly as useful trail maps, but it's still an interesting place. Half the inhabitants seem to be unironic extreme sports stereotypes which I find amusing (especially when they talk that way while serving you in the local grocery store), and there's a lot of fairly well disguised building work going on for the winter Olympics.

Spent most of yesterday exploring the trails round Lost Lake (there's about 34km of them in total, I think I must have walk round about half of them) and watching kids try to almost but not quite capsize their boats to land their friends in the water while staying dry themselves. In the evening I had dinner at Araxi which is an extremely nice restaurant with excellent service, very good martinis, an extremely extensive wine list, and the sort of bill at the end which you'd expect to go with those things. Still, it was very nice sitting outside watching the different elements of Whistler's population streaming through the village square while I had an extremely good dinner.

I may have regretted the 3oz martini, and the port, when the fire alarm went off at a quarter to two this morning, but it was quite funny to see just how much clothing people had managed to grab before evacuating. I'd pulled on jeans and a t-shirt, but was carrying my boots, some people clearly hadn't gone to bed yet at all, and at least a couple of people were standing around wrapped in bath towels and very little else, we certainly made an interesting queue at reception as we all waited to get keycards so we could get back into our rooms.

Today I went up Whistler Mountain, walked some of the trails, took the chair lift to the peak (an exciting ride through impenetrable cloud to a peak from which you could see very little other than impenetrable cloud), took the peak to peak cable car to Blackcomb and decided that it was wet and cloud wreathed enough to get the chair lift back down to Whistler. That was an interesting experience because at some points the cloud was thick enough that the wires were the only thing you could see from the chair lift, it's very strange having no idea how high up you are when you're in one of those things.

One thing I will say is that Jasper produces much better trail maps than Whistler does, they may not be quite as pretty but they number all the trails on the map (and on the trails) and they're very clear. The map of Whistler mountain numbered all the trails, but the sign posts mostly used the trail names which weren't all on the map and only sometimes used the trail numbers. Both Jasper and Whistler could learn lessons from the US Parks Service on producing 'realistic' topographical maps, simply marking high points on a trail doesn't really work and overlaying contours on an aerial photo is horrible IMHO.

Montreal and everything up to.

2009-08-21T01:29:34Z

Well, Constitution went well and we even received some nice emails from people saying how much they enjoyed it. I'm not sure when any of them found time to write those emails because the defining experience of Montreal was meeting half the bloody con there again. Also in accordance with prophecy I only got to see the bits of Constitution's programme that I was actually on, Friday was taken up with running stuff, Saturday was the five programme items I'd ended up scheduled in on that day plus nice Vietnamese food with big Ian and little Ian, and Sunday seemed to entirely consist of the auction and Unicon charter reform. I think I made it to Steph's guest of honour thing, but that's about it really. I must go to a con that Clare is programming and I'm not involved in because they sound really fun.

Banking and suchlike took longer than expected on the Monday due to the amount of tea that had to be consumed before simple arithmetic was possible, but it all got done and somehow I managed to get everything I needed clean and dry enough to go into a suitcase, and actually put it there. I'm very glad I ended up stumping up for a taxi to the airport as I fell asleep twice on the way there and I think London public transport would have been well beyond my mental abilities. Terminal 5 is surprising nice as airports go, most of the signs are clear (even if some of the electronic signage could be done better) and it seems to be big enough to do the whole funnelling of people to the correct flight thing. Airport shops are still just as weird as ever though, why sell luggage in the security zone which is too large to be taken on most flights as hand luggage? Who in their right mind would want to buy a Harrold the Bear (don't answer that, apparently it's where a lot of Harrod's profits come from), and why is it so hard to get a good coffee?

Anyway the flight itself was uneventful, and the weather too cloudy to see anything very interesting out of the window. Terminal 5's baggage handling all seemed to work even if half the plane ended up waiting at the wrong conveyor belt for their bags, and I discovered that if I've started with few mental faculties then making it two in the morning (as far as my body was concerned) was an excellent way to make following the signs for the taxi a real challenge.

Wednesday

Went walking along Rue St. Catherine in Montreal and it was fascinating to see the juxtaposition of churches, restaurants, and dancing girls. The west end of the street may veer into respectability but there is something pleasing about seeing churches and cafes all clustered together at the east end with a load of stairways alternately promising food or girls in roughly equal amounts of neon. It's not the sort of thing you see in a British city and along with the American style truck cabs and the pathological distaste for jay walking help drive home that I really was in a different country. Also they have Häagen-Dazs choc-ices everywhere which I had to resist eating all the time.

Went into Parc Mont Royal that afternoon and wander up to the viewpoint which looks out over downtown. The whole park reminds me somewhat of Myst as it has an unusual collection of objects and buildings scattered around it, odd bits of sculpture, the cross of Montreal (which looks so utilitarian I wondered if it was some sort of radio mast), this was reinforced later when I saw some of the underground city.

The Farthing Party Party was where I started to wonder if I'd ever left Cambridge, half of Constitution seemed to be there, and there were lots of interesting people I hadn't met before to talk to. Dave Clements proved himself to be either insane or a man of character by turning up having only just got off a plane, Cafe Cherrier did an excellent job considering the late change of venue and not really knowing what they were letting themselves in for.

The hotel itself was surprising quiet given it was built in the middle of downtown Montreal, I'm not sure quite how high up it was as the only way to reach the lobby was via the elevator which wouldn't stop on intermediate floors, but the hotel itself was constructed as four wings of rooms round an extremely nice roof garden. I almost wish I had more time to just laze around there because there were some absolutely perfect reading spots near some of the little water features.

Thursday

So the convention itself started on Thursday. Got my badge and stuff from registration and congratulated myself on not being a programme participant (more on that later) discovered that the art show and dealers' room weren't open quite yet and sat down with people to try and work out what to go.

I think on Thursday I went to

The Werrewolves of Brigadoon

A nice panel about people writing fantasy and what they got horribly wrong from a historical point of view. The point did get raised that such inaccuracies don't matter, and sometimes they don't but I think it's a matter of suspension of disbelief. If you're a good enough writer it may not matter, but it can be the last nail in the coffin if you're already having doubts about a book.

One Genre or Many

Extremely good panel with a bunch of horribly bright people in need of amplification.
No More Soldiers

An interesting panel that I can't talk about much since some of it was under Chatham House Rule. Interesting points from Jon Courtney Grimwood on what the introduction of autonomous infantry drones would mean as far as unequal warfare is concerned. I didn't even turn round and swear at the arm chair warmonger just behind me who seemed to think that anybody in Afghanistan must be a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida.
The Life and Work of John M. Ford

Mike Ford was a genius, and this panel was a great way for a whole pile of people to talk about how he was a genius. It didn't even matter that a large chunk of the audience seemed to be there simply because Neil Gaiman was on the panel, most of them stuck around and hopefully some of them went out and hunted down some of his books.
The World is Large & Strange.

I'm sure this was a good panel but I honestly can't remember much about it.

Had middle eastern food, i.e. more grilled meat than the mind can comfortably imagine and went to the Tor room party which was very crowded, very noisy, and involved dicing with frostbite if you wanted a beer. Only stayed for a couple of drinks before retreating back to the hotel and collapsing in bed.

Friday

Felt rotten on Friday morning, initially thought it was due to all the circadian rhythms to do with metabolising alcohol being out of whack but as the day wore on I realised I'd caught some sort of cold. Unluckily I went through pretty much all the symptoms, luckily I did it all in a day. It's a very strange experience when you think, "Ah, it's a couple of hours later so it must be time for aching joints… Oh there we go." As I say I managed to shake it of mostly within a day but cold air conditioned rooms combined with humid Montreal summer weather didn't really help with the cough which is still with me.

Programme items for Friday

What Fans Don't Know About Publishing part 1

Turned out to be pretty much a monologue by David Hartwell on the publishing process, how long it takes, what pitfalls it has, and how editors set about attacking the huge pile of manuscripts they get sent. I knew most of this from other sources but it's always good to hear David monologue.
Relativism & the Superhero

A chance to discover yet another person both at Constitution and Anticipation (Rhodri) and that things haven't advanced much since the step change in the later 80s and early nineties when we got things like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The thing I hadn't realised is how poor a lot of the comics not designed for a teenage and older readership have become. The great thing about comics when I was a kid was that there was stuff that hadn't been sanitised but was suitable for a young audience, and then there was stuff to move on to as you grew up. If those lower rungs of the ladder aren't any good these days then I think the whole comics genre will eventually wither, and that would be sad to see.
What's new in Astronomy

fivemack had his chance to shine eloquently describing some of the stamp collecting in modern astronomy and why it's so interesting, while others fussed over the care and feeding of projectors so they could do their own presentations. Even if he had had the time and resources to produce a power point presentation I think being able to wing it and be entertaining is an excellent skill to have, and one he exhibited brilliantly. Also interesting talks on extra solar planet detection, x-ray astronomy, and stuff about radio galaxies.
Modern Grahpic Design in Publishing

Personal conclusion: Most Americans wouldn't know it if it hit them round the head with a Pantone book.
Paul Kincaid talks with David Hartwell.

Big brain talks to other big brain, smaller brains in audience shrivel up in the emitted light. Okay, there was a lot about how David got started in book collecting and editing, and stuff about The New York Review of Science Fiction, and all sorts of other things like that, but it still all added up to him being a genius and those of us in the audience being painfully not.

Though on the bright side I don't think any of us in the audience subsisted on baloney sandwiches for a year—I don't care how many different kinds of mustard you used, you still ate baloney sandwiches FOR A YEAR!
Folklore, science fiction and fantasy.

Excellent panel on everything from midwifery to milk bottle tops, what folklore is compared to what folk tales are.

Dinner was a pretty good Vietnamese place, though I think beef with lemon grass is best done as a side dish rather than a main one because—delicious as it may be—you only want so much. Went to the UK and Irish fan party that James Bacon had organised, which like the Tor one the previous night was very full and very loud.

Found I'd been left a note via the voodoo board which had a signature that neither I nor anybody we knew could decipher into the name of anybody we knew, this puzzled me for much of the day until fivemack asked me about the talk on the Rap Rep I was giving. Minor panic then ensued until we determined that I had an evil twin (who couldn't spell his surname propoerly) at the convention, and the note and the talks were entirely to do with the other one. Left a note for Gerald Nordley (who my dad is friends with) but we didn't manage to meet up in the end, I'm rubbish at mornings, and north america is rubbish at phone networks.

Saturday

I had at least partially recovered from my cold on Saturday, not enough to make it to Gerald's programme item at 9, but then I rarely make it to programme items at nine in the morning anyway.

So… programme items

Science fiction film

Couple of academic presentations, one comparing science fiction films with westerns as a model of social critique, the other on how time travel is portrayed in film (i.e. often badly and inconsistently).
How are we getting on towards the singularity?

Fun panel on what we mean by the Singularity with a capital S, whether it will ever happen, the important differences between Socrates and a goldfish, and various other things. Somebody on the panel mentioned that they didn't believe in the singularity because if you were writing fifty or a hundred years ago about transportation you might posit a transportation singularity where we can move so fast that distance becomes irrelevant. I wish that discussion had gone further because I'm pretty sure people have in the past written about transportation and energy singularities, and I think the modern trend for the information or AI singularity is just the latest of these. Still a fun panel though.
The Middle Ages, Getting it Right.

Lots of people being interesting and informative about what life was really like and our misconceptions concerning it.
Our Long National Nightmare of Peace & Prosperity Is Over!

Jon Courtney Grimwood and others discussed the waning of American influence and the effect a certain president may have had on this process, and what the changing nature of our world has had, or will have, on science fiction.
Aunts in Spaceships

I was hoping for a good discussion on why they are so few older female characters in s.f. who aren't mothers or grandmothers, but it mostly became a list of the examples the panel could think of rather than any discussion of why they were lacking in other books.
Assistive Tech., or When is a Cyborg?

Reasonably good discussion about what sort of assistive technologies somebody would have to have before we would class them as a cyborg. The answer seemed to be that things like insulin pumps won't count until they are self regulating closed loop systems, and when we have reached the stage where those things exist and are allowed and we have artificial limbs better than natural ones in some respects, then we still won't call people cyborgs because those things will just be normal.

Met up with fivemack, papersky, and zorinth for more Vietnamese food, the soup definitely seemed to help with the cold. We tried to go to some parties but ended up waiting so long in the queue that I certainly gave up.

Sunday

I made it to a programme item at ten in the morning! Still too late to see Gerald, but hey ho.

Canadian English language small press

Interesting discussion by three people involved in small presses, especially amusing on occasions when US audience members spluttered at the mention of grants, and interesting to hear the different strategies taken on print runs and bindings (rip and strip seemed to be common practice, whereas I get the feeling UK small presses tend to number the hardback books to make them more collectible rather than turning simply them into paperbacks when they don't sell. Also interesting to here the print run numbers.
Atheism in the Renaissance.

Brilliant talk on what atheism meant in the Renaissance period, who was featured on common lists of atheists, epicurean physics, and the marginal notes found in copies of Lucretius. Ada was a brilliant speaker and I salute anybody who goes to Texas to teach the history of atheist thought.
Concert.

At rysmiel's suggestion I think I went to see Ada and friends singing some brilliant a cappella pieces, including one for two parts, Odin and Loki.
Adapting Alan Moore

An okay panel about attempts to adapt Alan Moore's creations to the big screen, I think there's been better discussion along those lines at Eastercon.
The Herschel Space Telescope

Dave Clements gave an excellent talk on Herschel, it's instruments, what it's designed to study, and how it was built. He also demonstrated quite nicely that he still hadn't worked out I had an evil twin by asking me whether I'd need a projector for any of my talks. Very interesting to see the first images even if they weren't calibrated and so weren't of any real scientific use, it's still interesting to see the discover image of the infrared background.

Went for dinner with fivemack, my duck leg salad turned out to be two rather large duck legs and a salad roughly the size of Belgium. I had to assure the waitress that it had been fine, and there hadn't been anything wrong with it, it was just huge. Got back in time to hear the Hugo announcements—various people were robbed, and various other people announced that they would not accept future nominations and that people should really go and vote for somebody else. I think if Wall-E of The Dark Knight hadn't won the dramatic presentation long form award I would have gone out and bought a hat just so that I could have eaten it, but luckily that category was sane this year. I don't think we even tried to go to parties that night.

Monday

Only went to two programme items, a discussion between Paul Cornell and Tore A. Høie about why we don't have a world government, and why it's so common in science fiction, and at what level it is sensible to make decisions—trust me, it was a lot more interesting than it might sound. The other programme item I went to was about the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox, and was so good and popular it had to move rooms (thus leaving any late comers to find a mysterious lack of a panel on the mysterious lack of aliens). Went for dim sum for a whole horde of people and emerged to see Frank Wu still being very pleased about having won a Hugo. Went for a walk down along the river front and failed to do various bits of site seeing due to them being closed to the public or us being just too late to see them that day. Had coffee and caught up with things, and then went for dinner at Restaurant Vallier which was excellent if slightly slow.

Went and had drinks with papersky, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a Jewish archaeologist whose name escapes me (Alter, dhole on LJ, thanks fivemack.), Jon Singer, and a whole load of other people. Then we went to the dead dogs' party where I met Dave again, and we determined that neither of us had actually seen my evil twin at any point, so they might have been a typo for all we knew, took liberal amounts of medicinal whisky for my throat, and watched unsuspecting people try Stroh for the first time. How I managed to pack for the train the next day I'm not entirely sure, but apparently I managed it.

Wow, just wow.

2009-08-20T05:42:59Z

Quesnel to Whistler is an absolutely beautiful train journey even if there is a forest fire just over one of the hills reducing visibility a lot. Saw an eagle catching a salmon in Quesnel this morning, a few eagles and ospreys along the route, some wild sheep, a black bear, and completely failed to get any of them in a photograph.

Oh well.

The British and Aussie contingent on the train did their best to drink all the gin and tonic water they had (we didn't succeed, but when all drinks are included its awfully tempting to start a drinking game along the lines of, "Saw a bear? Get a round of drinks in! Crossed a trestle bridge? Get a round of drinks in! Can't think of an excuse for getting a round of drinks in? Get a round of drinks in!"). Our only real excuse was that as the tour group got relaxed they got loud, and as some of the US guys got relaxed they got loud and talked about DIY, loudly. In the face of that, ordering more G & Ts than the mind can comfortably imagine seems like a perfectly reasonably strategy.

More trains.

2009-08-19T13:40:40Z

Yesterday I got the Rocky Mountaineer from Jasper to Quesnel. Lots of good photos in the morning (or at least lots that will be good when they've been cropped, straightened, and possibly had some shoppery done to them—sunrise reflecting back into the sky off ice fields is hard to photograph) and then a bit of a gap due to somebody having forgotten to charge his camera battery. Luckily the staff could find a power point I could use to recharge it, and a figure 8 power cable for the charges since mine was in my suitcase.

Food on the Rocky Mountaineer is excellent, and given there are only 30 of us in Gold Leaf I think we must have one staff member for every five or six passengers (if you included the cooks etc.), suddenly I can understand why it costs what it costs. :-)

Quesnel itself is interesting, it's mostly a lumber town with some nice bridges and some very silly painted fire hydrants (I think there are about fifteen but I only photographed five while walking round).

Anyway, today the train goes down to Whistler, and I have fully charged the camera battery this time.

Tou get an interesting sort of person in pubs in Jasper.

2009-08-17T04:15:04Z

Sit at the bar and strike up conversation or see who strikes up conversation with you. Last night it was a researcher in herbal medicine from Chicago, tonight it was a guy from Belgium who is in Canada because he read Lovecraft as a kid and is fascinated by cold. Since he failed to get the job he wanted in Antarctica he figured Canada was the best place to try where he already spoke the language.

I'm sure I can find somebody more unusual tomorrow if I try.

Oh, and if I had to rank them then The Dead Dog isn't bad at all, but the Jasper Brewing Company is fantastic—good stout, good hppy IPA, and another four beers (the tow of which I tried were good and all brewed on the premises. It looks like a sports bar but as far as I can tell everybody ignores the televisions.

There is a post about Anticipation coming…

2009-08-16T04:45:59Z

It's just a bit long and I'm still only up to the Friday of the con.

See ceb, I do listen. Or I have more time when I'm on holiday.

Shout if you want a postcard.

2009-08-15T15:48:17Z

I can't promise if you'll get one with a majestic landscape or a really grumpy looking bear, or if you express any preference that I'll listen to it, but I will try and send you a postcard if you ask.

I've set all comments to screened so feel free to include your address if you aren't sure I've got it.

Trans-Canada

2009-08-14T22:18:17Z

I'm writing this while away from all internet access so I'm not sure when it will actually get posted, but it seems to be better to put down impressions as they occur rather than try and collect them all together later. In fact the first part of this I didn't even type originally, I'm copying it from the scrawl in my notebook and hoping that I can tease it into some sort of sense.

Surprising—well actually not at all surprising really—number of fans on the train to Toronto, we may have heard that important people were dashing to get planes but it seems most of fandom likes railed transport and was heading in the same direction, Apparently the train Alan and Colette got the day before was even more packed with people I'd have at least know well enough to say hello to.

Toronto, despite being a bustling multi-cultural city reminds me oddly of Oban. I think I feel like that because it's a place I didn't really have enough time to explore properly and that I ended up down on the harbour front watching the boats and the dramatic sky which are things I've always enjoyed doing while waiting for ferries in Scotland. In other ways though it feels utterly different and alien, my first view of the Skydome and the CN Tower was through the perspex wall of the sky walk, backlit by the sun and sheathed in glare. More reminiscent of some external staging shot from a seventies sci-fi film than any real object, and impossible to examine more closely as approaching the window brought the sun into full view and washed out the entire scene. After that the direct reality of them seemed oddly mundane in comparison.

I'm fascinated by the underground and enclosed cities that Montreal and Toronto have, they feel more like abstract puzzle artefacts than utilitarian creations. Montreal's especially is peppered with strange wandering corridors, echoing chambers with things projected onto the ceiling, artworks that you feel must have some sort of purpose, and a map which feels designed to be a way to determine where you are, but not how to get elsewhere. Toronto's compass point indications at each intersection seem like an earlier and simpler maze puzzle in comparison, if you can only work out how to change them to your advantage.

Met Alan and Colette in Toronto station when I'd just got off my train and they were printing out tickets. Small world really.

I find it hard to guess how large any of the places the trains I've been on have stopped at really are, or indeed how large a population their station serves. Given that at some of the stops yesterday on the way to Toronto only two or three people got on or off I'd guess many are pretty small, but I have the feeling the total number of passengers on VIA every day isn't huge either. Today I woke to trees occasionally opening up into mist shrouded lakes, almost impossible to photograph unless you sat poised with your camera at the ready. I'm not sure that the beauty of the forests themselves can be photographed, I've tried and it's just trees, but the sustained effect of them does seem beautiful.

Ah, just found figures in the route guide for The Canadian, some of the stops struggle even to count as villages.

It's been interesting to see the forest slowly opening up over the course of today, we've not left it for good yet but we're following the course of the Vermillion River at the moment and it seems to be thinning. I'm writing this bit now because I saw a swamp of dead trees and telegraph poles a few minutes ago, The latter jutted at odd angles from the water but seemed to still serve their purpose, the spans of wire never quite trailing into the swamp, while their once living neighbours now prop each other up on brittle white limbs, something more like a forest of the dead I don't think I'll ever see.

Eventually, by the end of this trip I may have learned that I can't stand up straight in the observation car except in the aisle, and even there only just.

Winnipeg was interesting, met a couple of people from the Worlccon dead dogs' party at the station (bringing the number of known fans on this train up to five including me) and we went in search of a second hand bookshop they'd heard good things about, and then a coffee shop when we discovered it didn't open till ten, and then another bookshop and a second hand music shop when we discovered that the proprietor wasn't exactly strict in his time keeping. We did get in there in the end though and it was a good bookshop, I'd have spent a whole pile of money if I hadn't had to think about getting things back home, and I'm sure somebody with more knowledge of comics than me could probably have had great fun going through the gigantic stock he had. Hell, I could have had great fun if I'd had an entire afternoon to do it in.

The forests had completely disappeared during the night, I'd guess with our transit into Manitoba since geographic and political transitions seem to go hand in hand here, so the late morning and lunch time were spent going across the prairies. They aren't as featureless and uniform as people make out, I was mostly reminded of Cambridgeshire farmland on a larger scale (as all landscape here seems to be on a larger scale). I apparently missed The Largest Coke Can In The World (made from an old water tower) about an hour past Winnipeg, but I think I can live with that.

The landscape started to change when we entered Saskatchewan in mid afternoon, swampy pools suddenly appearing and the landscape gradually becoming more hilly, and the sudden appearance of cows.

I think Fight Club had a point about single serving friends when you're flying, but trains make them last that little bit longer. Most of the people on this part of the train are either elderly Brits and Canadians or part of a large German tour party, but I've met a couple of interesting ones (both from the same place in Cornwall, and rather amused to discover so as they didn't previously know each other).

I've noticed most of my photos are of dramatic skies, and most will need a bit of Photoshopping before they look nearly as dramatic as they do in real life. Something to do when I get home I suppose.

This morning was a much slower start than the last few days, because of the timing of stops brunch was being served all morning and everyone seemed to take advantage of this (and the stop in Edmonton provided a nice quiet period for a lie in). Trying to photograph the scenery from the observation car proved amusingly difficult. You would invariably find yourself on the wrong side, and just when you'd got to the right side and got your camera pointed through a window the tree line would close in again and block the view. Seem to have got some reasonable pictures anyway and the observation car was slightly emptier than yesterday since the large German tour group got off at Edmonton.

Jasper's weather feels refreshingly British at the moment, the Canadian's keep complaining about the terrible summer they are having but it;s generally cool enough to go out and do things and not too humid and isn't raining that often, so it suits me perfectly.

There's probably a bunch more stuff I should write about the train journey, and the food (which was excellent) and how paeprsky should definitely do it if they have a cheap ticket offer again, but at the moment I think I'll just go for a wander round Jasper and have a think about editing my actual Anticipation post into some sort of sensible shape.
`

Musical silliness.

2009-07-24T23:52:26Z

It turns out you can love synthesisers too much and that little drummer robots are really nifty.

On a less silly note I do like the look of the new version of Logic, tweaking audio tracks looks like it's now much easier, and the convert to synth track feature looks like a sort of in place version of Re-Cycle. Doesn't officially support PPC based macs, though it will apparently still work.

Moon, firm plans.

2009-07-24T08:58:02Z

Right, I'm going to go and see Moon this Saturday at 17:00, shout if you want me to book you tickets.

Edit: Tickets booked, meet in the bar beforehand.

Moon.

2009-07-20T16:23:35Z

Anybody fancy seeing Moon some time this week? I can't do Wednesday night but I can do almost any other evening.

Things I have learnt from films.

2009-06-16T23:26:15Z

The deadliness of a weapon is inversely proportional how advanced it is.

Auto-cannons wielded by T600 terminators are only inconvenient.
Nuclear bombs can be survived just by hiding in a fridge.
Guns in general rarely actually kill people, the bigger and more advanced the gun the less likely to actually kill somebody.
Bows and arrows are deadly, even when used as melee weapons.
Anything that isn't a missile weapon trumps anything that is.

I'm pretty sure the destruction of the world will be achieved by somebody wielding nothing more than a thigh bone.

Oh there is an exception to this, low tech explosives are deadly even though they are clearly higher tech than some sharp pointy sticks.

It normally takes until after lunch to descend to this level.

2009-06-02T09:14:35Z

Cryptic crossword clues and nude modelling, and before ten a.m., I think my cow-orkers are getting filthier.

Even more DW invite codes

2009-05-20T00:54:11Z

You know the drill.

Charlie Kaufman should not be allowed to make puns

2009-05-15T23:48:27Z

Calling a film which begins in Schenectady, New York, and is very much about the whole being represented in part and vice versa, Synecdoche, New York is quite possibly the most brilliantly clever and terrible pun I've witness in a very long time.

FAO fivemack

2009-05-11T15:16:30Z

It's not quite granite tablets, but it's close enough.

A good weekend.

2009-05-11T10:07:02Z

Went down to London to spend some London Review Bookshop tokens I'd been given (bought the new book by Iain Sinclair) and thence to Oxford for tea and cake at j4 and addedentry's. Then back into Oxford to see Star Trek with juggzy, timscience, and jackfirecat (the film was really rather good, just the sort of gleeful canon shredding that was needed) and then back to j&o's (via the pub and a noodle place) for the party. Many bad puns were made, guitars strummed, cake eaten, champagne drunk, Scottish folk dance crossover bands discussed, and probably loads of other things I've forgotten. Thank you fivemack for making breakfast the next morning and helping us all feel slightly more human, or at least capable of composing rude limericks about Oxbridge colleges.

Dreamwidth

2009-05-05T09:43:30Z

Thanks to auntysarah I now have a dreamwidth account, same user name as here and many other places.

Edit: Blimey, didn't take some of you long to find me. :-)