The last one to have been edited - Azkaban.

psychochicken was surprised at the tone of my last post: he thought that earlier, discussing the new Trek in the pub, I'd been more positive about it.

Which leads me to wonder, just why is my praise so damningly faint for the new Star Trek movie? ( ... )To me, this is another visual-effects blockbuster; good as far as such things go, but no better. Comparable to the Star Wars prequels, say.

I saw the new JJ Abrams Star Trek in the IMAX cinema this afternoon. ( Here are my impressions. )

[this isn't my idea originally, a lady on a dating site put up a description of herself that was listed alphabetically and I thought it was only appropriate to reply in kind. Here's what I sent ... ]

Alphabetically , I am ...

Appreciative of alliterative allusions
Barely begun
Currently consulting a compendium of characteristics (looking up a dictionary; cheat? who, me?)
Delighted to make your acquaintance
Enjoying the exercise so far
Flippant frequently
Gently good-
Humoured (couldn't resist)
Infrequently impulsive (but 'what the hell' is always the right decision)
Just, joyous and with joie de vivre
Kindly
Literate, and I take myself lightly
Mike by name, hello
Not afraid of hard work if it's worth it
Observant
Phlegmatic and philosophical
Quebecois originally, but now with a Scottish accent
Romantic? sometimes - remember about 'what the hell'
Sceptical and scientific, but also ...
Tolerant (and typically Taurean, but it doesn't matter to me)
Unwise at times
Vocal on subjects that I care about
Wry
eXcellently bad at atrocious wordplay (you already got in xenophilic)
Yarn-spinning
Zestful

[I liked it, I thought I'd save it here.]

I used the LinkedIn system today to grab a bunch of contacts for business purposes and took the opportunity to go looking for some old friends that I'd lost touch with. One emailed me back immediately that it was so nice to hear from me. I worked it out, I knew this lady for about six months, six and a half years ago.

I have described before in this journal how I was unemployed for a long time prior to my current state. Before that, I worked in the Netherlands, and my social life was an ex-pats' organisation (called SMILE, I can't remember what it stood for and it hardly matters). We would meet for dinner and beer around a table in a central Eindhoven pub every Friday and I was one of the more regular attendees.

So much so that when the then organiser retired and moved away, I got landed with being his successor. I decided bugger that, quite apart from the fact that my own job was precarious at the time. I organised a Yahoo group and a rota of regular greeters / table-holders, who formed a committee of people who would take charge of projects. When I finally had to cut and run I left it in good shape.

What I didn't realise and I only found out today was that the few people I stayed in contact with were reporting back to the SMILE table about how I was getting on, and that the club had been cheered that I'd sorted myself out.

People make an impression on me; I never consider that I might make a good impression on them. I'm guilty, as my (best) friend has said of himself, of travelling light. When I had a cat, where I left her was home. Most of the time my social life has been around a place, not necessarily people. I'd be a stranger in town so I'd go to a club like SMILE and I'd form my social life around going to that place and seeing who was there. I've never been good at forming or keeping relationships outside of a framework like that.

So I am totally gobsmacked to find that an entire club of people had been pleased to hear the report that I was doing all right, and that someone I expected to barely remember me was so pleased to hear from me after more than six years.

(She's also doing fine, by the way; private practice as a patent attorney in Munich and married last month, Yay her:)

Most readers here will be aware of Satellite 2; a convention in Glasgow on the 25th-26th of July, marking the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing. In case anyone isn't aware, Iain M Banks will be guest of honour.

And I've been roped in to a panel, discussing the moon in literature. Apparently there's homework to do beforehand. Should be fun.

Today my office passed its ISO14001 audit!

... And? you say.

And? And! I wrote the management system. I managed it into existence. I'm responsible for it. It's a thing that I've made. Truth to tell, I cobbled it together from parts from other jobs, but it's my baby, all of it.

Here's the thing. I've been doing management systems for clients for about a year and a half, since I had the job dropped on me because our principal consultant quit rather than go with the new masters (whom I for one still wholeheartedly welcome, except when they piss me off). I've had some successes, and some of them have been spectacular achievements for major clients or spectacular saves from the hands of incompetents. But I've never before from beginning to end put a system in place and seen it through to certification.

And I've never been the one being audited. And ISO14001 is the environmental management standard, and me being an environmental management consultant it's something that I'm supposed to actually know something about.

So today was a major professional vindication; I'm actually good at the job that I do (not just competent, that was a glowing audit report), as verified by an external assessor, and it's not a result of taking over the job of someone more qualified and taking the credit for seeing it to completion.

And I did it for my own office. I was mentioned in despatches to the MD and the chairman (whose name is on the company), both of whom got a copy of the audit report, and various other directors.

So, I've got a major confidence boost, a major professional credit and two significant learning experiences all in the one day.

Then I went out for a steak and several beers and came up with a new story. Today has been a good day.

One of my favourite web-comic makers has just been burned out of her flat. There are links on her site to a fund-raiser that her publishers are running, and also some amazingly poignant art.

This is how the year ends and begins, with good friends, good music, good beer and good whisky.

I see that Amazon have got around to extending their DRM-free music download service to the UK. So much for my credit card, then.

I'm being good, I've just downloaded John Denver's I Want to Live album. With "How Can I Leave You Again", "Tradewinds", "It Amazes Me", "Thirsty Boots", "Dearest Esmeralda", "Singing Skies and Dancing Waters", and "I Want to Live", it is one of the best folk/Americana albums I have ever heard, and I haven't heard it in a long time.

Grace, Hewat and Polwart at the Orkney folk festival this year.

ahforgetit is a science fiction reference from the nineties, a political group split off from the Culture in Iain M Banks' novel, Excession, called the AhForgetIt Tendency: essentially the Party Party Party Party of the Culture.

About that time the Internet was starting to take flight and I was one of the earlier adopters, with my dialup modem and my Demon subscription and interacting with people by being a member of Usenet newsgroups (look them up, they came after - well, alongside - bulletin board systems and before chatrooms). When posting to these newsgroups, the software would want to know what organisation you belonged to, usually a university or a company or whatever, but I was a private operator. One response that I liked was 'in a box by the door,' which is a Babylon 5 reference. I chose the AhForgetIt Tendency to belong to.

Since then I have used The AhForgetIt Tendency as my organisation and ahforgetit as my user name wherever I go. In fact if you google ahforgetit, you find me.

I gave in to my Shiny! impulse last month and bought myself an iPod(tm,$$$,etc.). It is a very shiny 'pod indeed, a 32Gb iTouch, which now goes by the name of Ludwig. (Commiserations to anyone who is old enough to get that reference.)

I was delighted to find that Ludwig is just big enough to dump my entire mp3 collection into. Since this collection is in part the result of *ahem* backing-up friends' and family's CDs and hard drives over a period of a few years, there are some things that I've had hanging around that I've never got around to listening to. I know that 30 gig of music is not a huge collection, but it's more than I care to trawl through sitting in front of my computer after sitting in front of a computer all day at work. Now I can listen to this stuff on the move or plug it all into my stereo.

So, with over a thousand albums to listen to, how much of it do I actually play? Not a lot, it has to be said. The music I would normally have listened to I'm over-familiar with, and the stuff I hadn't got round to, I never really fancied. I play about one percent of it, which is a bit of a waste, and I'm getting tired of what I do play. I've found a few gems, Heather Nova, James, 10,000 Maniacs, and so on, but I need new music.

Cue Fopp, and the classic albums sitting in Asda and HMV for less than a fiver. I'm ploughing through Tom Waits' back catalogue at the moment, also got hold of Led Zeppelin IV and Paranoia by Black Sabbath, and of newer acts, the Magic Numbers, the Zutons, the Fratellis, Goldfrapp, King Creosote and so forth.

I've also gone the download route, but since I object strongly to DRM and other such attempts to fence off and plough under the cultural commons, I have an eMusic subscription. This morning I got Vampire Weekend, Eliza Carthy, Rev. Gary Davis, Karine Polwart and Davison/Coleman. I still have ninety-odd tracks to use up by the end of the month out of my initial subscription and freebies. I think this will be a good chance to broaden my classical, jazz, blues and folk listening.

So, I'm now entertaining suggestions for new music to listen to. Classic albums, new and interesting acts, any genre (except hip-hop and club music, not that I expect most people who read this to be into those).

addendum

Oh dear, I just discovered something that I'd heard about earlier and not connected to myself - Amazon also do DRM-free music downloads. (waves fond farewell to credit card)

I'm going to be strong, I'm only downloading John Denver's I Want to Live, for now. This was an album I played over and over again when I was a teenager and it's absolutely beautiful. It's only a shame that downloads don't carry the sleeve notes along with them, with one of the most evocative poems I have ever read.

continued

Bastards are limited to the US at the moment. The only news articles I can find say that UK roll-out is due 'this year', dated 2007. Need a US credit card, for many reasons, but mainly this.

I find myself in the position of being boss nowadays. And I find that being boss, everyone seems to think that I have the solutions. However, everyone I'm supervising has been employed to be able to find solutions.

For the new starts, this is fair enough, they need direction and encouragement; joined-up thinking is a skill that need to be learned. But there is one guy who is quite a lot younger than me but on the same pay scale, and he has started to defer to me more than I think he ought. He tends to put a situation to me and then tail off, expecting me to complete the thought.

I today refused to do his thinking for him, and said, "And?" and waited. And lo and behold, he turned out to be able to finish his job himself.

I'm happy to be the boss, but I'm damned if that means that I'm going to do everyone's thinking for them. We're consultants; even the new starts have PhDs.

I was just at the housewarming party of unblinkered and (I think) f3f4 where there was art by various people including psychochicken and sha_d. I came away having purchased a little piece that means absolutely nothing to anyone but me, and I include the artist in this (although it was her favourite of those pieces).

It's a little brooch with a soldier on a bicycle over a brocade background, with a bead hanging from it. When I look at it, it brings to my mind 'No Man's Land', the Eric Bogle song. I bet that nobody else would have that reaction, but this little thing makes me choke up to look at it. I had to have it.

It's now sitting in the brim of the top hat that rests on my computer monitor. I think that may be its proper place. I may even wear the hat with its brooch some time.

I saw this on rivka's LJ; it amused me greatly.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog

This evening's gig was again fantastic. Anyone who hasn't heard Uni should go on Saturday to Borders, where she will be playing at 3.00. And everyone else should, too.

This evening was enlivened because Cupcake (small and sweet - quite the sunniest person I have ever met) had come wearing a wedding dress and roller skates. Uni played her The Wedding Song specially.

And it's a small world - a lady was there who I recognised and we got chatting. It turned out that I had got her completely confused with someone else, but we still knew one another and she had been just as desperately trying to figure out who I was as I was she (if that makes sense ... you know it does. I think. Anyway.) Turns out that she's an old friend from when I did my PhD, she was a classmate of my flatmate and one of the usual suspects for a while. She remembered my cooking! (in complimentary terms, you bastards) After ten years! How cool is that! I must actually be a reasonable cook.

I heard this lady play in Tchai Ovna this evening, and then we went along to Box, where she rocked them with a ukelele.

She'll be playing tonight at Twisted Wheel on Queen Street and tomorrow in Borders. (This blog is copied elsewhere, and the Youtube links might not work there. Just come back to this original for the videos, they're fun)






For those of my readers in forn parts, she will be playing in Brighton and Hastings next week.

22 May 2008 16:30 Family matinee performance @ The Eat, Hastings
22 May 2008 20:00 Uni & her Ukelele & Bohemaia Ukulele Band @ The Room, Hastings
24 May 2008 13:00 Matinee show @ The Joogleberry Playhouse, Brighton

According to a LibraryThing survey, these 106 works are the ones most often marked as “unread”, That is, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you started, but didn’t finish.

Final touch: denote (*) the ones you liked, and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you did read them for school in the first place.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude (just bought this one, will be reading it this month, honest)
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion*
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (I really enjoyed the film; I should get back to this one)
Don Quixote
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey* (great story, I read it when I was eleven)
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
American Gods**
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (and you won't find it on my shelves, either)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (nor this)
Foucault’s Pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys**
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (started Purgatorio but I never finished it)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince*
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon*
Neverwhere**
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything (I prefer The Science of Discworld)
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down*
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

I'm not sure what this says about me, except perhaps that if I'm not enjoying a book, I rarely struggle through it to the end. And that I don't often buy a book 'just because I ought to'. And that I like Dumas and I think Ayn Rand was a strident nutbar.