And what a time it's been, ranging from film reviews, proto-tweeting, holiday diaries, through random bits of programming stuff as I ran into it (and continue to run into, but at a lower rate these days), roughly annual anime reviews (cinema having fallen by the wayside) and lately, logging bike rides at quarterly intervals. And I guess how the last 5 years since retirement went will be how the next years go too.
Well, that's it. I'm now no longer in employment, so that means I'm sort-of retired, now.
Damn, that's a big backlog of things I've got queued to do!
Fifty years ago today, due to a launch malfunction of a communications satellite, the BBC ran an opportunistic program with the first live TV broadcast from the UK to the Satellite Tracking Station in Carnarvon, WA. And so I got to appear on live TV.
Me third from left in the front row.
UPDATE: More at honeysucklecreek.net, including a tidied up summary video. I'm on screen about the 3:50 mark.
UPDATE 2: Now in colour, me in the middle with the shadow of the microphone on my chest.
I flew from Glasgow to London Heathrow on a domestic BEA flight. There was some breaking news from America when we arrived.
Went to discuss details of the new kitchen with the specialist designer. And amongst all the discussion of features of accessible kitchens, a stray mention of a safety feature — I can't remember which — being good for when grand-children were running around.
Aaaauuuugh! I feel ancient!
… or “Kids these days”
Chatting in one of the threads on the AnimeNation Evangelion forum, about the sensory abilities of the Mass Production units — or “harpies”, as they are colloquially referred to — I mentioned that in the light of their apparent lack of eyes or ears, but questing muzzles, that “Perhaps, like the Pinball Wizard, they play by sense of smell.”
I was gob-smacked when I was subsequently asked to explain the reference. Apparently an appreciation for the classics hasn't reached the 20-somethings yet. :)
How times change - I had to explain yesterday to a 7-year-old boy what smoke signals were.
During the last month, I've been doing some recruiting - and it's terrifying how many people out there are trying to earn a living in software engineering without any idea of what polymorphism is about, or the notion of time-complexity of algorithms, let alone design skills that have any nod towards the notion that software objects should have well defined interfaces and responsibilities. And this is not an age related thing, either. Though eventually we did find a couple of suitably qualified candidates, one mid 20s, one early 40s, who are now with us.
The following meme has been propagating through the blogosphere
- Open up the music player on your computer (if you have one -- the music player, I mean. Clearly you have a computer, because otherwise you couldn't read this).
- Set it to play your entire music collection.
- Hit the "shuffle" command.
- Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That's right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility.
And I'm sufficiently old fashioned that the collection to draw from is old stuff I ripped from vinyl that never made it to CD, a few cheesy J-pop anime OP and EDs ripped from DVD plus whatever's on the CD in the CD-ROM drive at the moment, so forms a highly unrepresentative - if off-beat - sample. Bad experiences with cassette tapes 30-odd years ago has made me generally leery of music in "soft" storage, so I've not really gotten into the whole .mp3 thing.
Later - results:
Fairly representative, really, of the two strands of .mp3s
Friday night, I'd come home and declared my intention to drink too much beer, after a stressy week. As it was, I had a couple of (500ml) bottles, and didn't feel like taking any more fluid. And then settled down to sleep just after 10pm.
... you're in Paris, and everyone around you is speaking French, and you still reach for domo arigatou rather than merci beaucoup!
Today, on the 47th anniversary of Sputnik, Spaceship One claimed the X prize, with a turnaround time of just six days. On the seventh, they can rest.
This is starting to be more like space as it ought to have been. And I don't think that there was any coincidence in their choice of the date for their achievement.
Who knows, maybe I will manage to get into orbit some day.
I don't know if Andy Warhol had even yet uttered those words about everyone being famous for 15 minutes when I had my slot come up. In 1967, I appeared on the first experimental live intercontental TV broadcast via satellite (Australia to UK). Through the miracles of modern tech, an nth generation print has been captured in digital form. That's me on the right, brother Andy on the left.
Well, today is my 47th birthday. And this weekend, I've made two contradictory responses to the passage of time.
One of the things that I'd been looking for, on and off, since my beard turned quite white (see recent au naturel picture) was something to keep it more in step with the mere greying of the hair on my head. And one of the few adverts I spotted on TV while on holiday that weren't for new cars, was one for just such a product (Just For Men - including a beard colourant range). So I ventured into Boots and finally found it in the Men's grooming section - rather than under hair-care. So now I'm coloured rather more like I used to be; though leaving the temples strategically grey, and keeping it short (currently a bit shorter than the profile picture, as I got the boss at the local barber's last time, and he does everything freehand - no number 4 on the side, number 6 on the beard for him. This did mean I only had to mix up a fraction of the expectd amount of colourant, though.
Oh, and as I now can't really accomodate into the 10-15cm range at all comfortably (the face jammed up against something with an awkward line of sight, scredriver against cheek to fix a fiddly screw sort of distance), amongst the eyewashes and similar - not the opticians bit - I found the off-the-peg reading glasses. My prescription from the start of the year was +0.75 (dioptre, presumably), but these only started at +1, so that's what I got - a stylish slim-line rimless pair. Now I wonder how much I'll actually use them.
[Later] - At work, one colleague remarked on how short my hair now was; and another commented that he thought the style made me look younger. So I had to 'fess up that I'd coloured it. Later on, the Site Manager's PA also made favourable and unsolicited comment on the new style.
Guess I should have done it sooner.
On the positive front — some time in the last few months, we actually got BBC digital radio locally : rebooting the DAB system I bought last year, to force it to look at all the multiplexes, it actually came up with the Beeb. Which meant we were actually able to listen to hiss-free radio on Saturday night. (Remember when that was what we were promised when we went from AM to FM?).
Of course that doesn't mean a content upgrade, alas. Saturday Review covered a new TV series aimed at the over 50s. While that's not me yet, it's not so many years away now. The program under review was something terribly earnest Play for Today thing about an ageing football hooligan/cabbie and a public school teacher on the verge of retirement. Fortunately one the panel at least had the guts to denounce it as patronising class stereotypes that ought have been called “Mr. Chips gets his nose bobbed”. The sort of thing I'd say to people now, “If you ever find me watching that sort of thing — or agreeing with the Daily Mail — that means it's well past time to put me out of my misery!”.
So after that we went and watched half a dozen episodes of Shoujo Kakumei Utena, purchased from amazon.com to take advantage of the current weakness of the US dollar. As part of the official Peter Pan generation, I expect to be more in sympathy with stuff aimed at Japanese high-school girls than focus group designed 50+ fare for many years to come.
While in Borders today, having not found the the new Sigur Ros CD/EP, and wondering what else I might buy, I spotted, in the ex-TV DVD section, the complete Space Patrol with Captain Dart.
I remember the series fondly from 40 years ago. I looked over the DVD, and put it back on the shelf. It wouldn't be fond watching in these cynical days. Even if I am the market demographic that such things are aimed at.
Although the news was sad, I was heartened to hear yesterday the coverage that the death of Anthony Buckeridge occasioned on the radio. The Jennings books were a part of my childhood, and so, it would seem, for others of a similar age.
It is actually in the comparisons between these books and *spit* Harry Potter that the latter comes off the worse. JK Rowlings really didn't get the fundamental point that the hero of school stories isn't supposed to be particularly good at sports - one of the things that inclined me against the Potter bandwagon, even before it became the phenomenon it is, and sheer lack of editing started to drag the books down.
With the US getting sniffy about other countries' passports starting in the autumn, and with the occasional need to travel there for work, I decided that it was time to get my passport renewed, albeit a little early, to save visa hassles. So off I trudge to the Post Office for a form and new photos.
And the nifty digital photo booth preview screen serves me up four pictures looking like Nelson Mandela! Something is well off on the contrast, since I'm not that white haired, or heavily tanned. So I pick the best (least worst) of the bunch to print.
It'll the new pic on my profile, for the ghoulishly curious - when Blogger lets me edit the profile once more.
After a break of some weeks, cycling into town both days left my leg muscles complaining at the unexpected use.
The reason for cycling in on Sunday was to go to the eye test appointment I'd set up the previous day, and here other muscles were being called into question. After the nurse had done the peripheral vision and internal pressure tests, I was handed over to a youngish guy who was the optometrist. He took one look at my date of birth, and prescribed reading glasses. Then he started the measurements.
I still tested out with (at least - they never bother to push the limits of what I can read on the little letters) 20/17 vision - and though I now notice a perceptible fraction of a second's accommodation if I'm looking at stuff closer than 20cm, I had no problem with even the smallest text presented in the near vision test. Sure, a magnifying lens meant that I don't have to do any accommodation - but I'd rather keep the muscles in use while I can, rather than letting them get flabby.
The only time recently I've thought my sight may not be as keen as once it was was trying to read the best-before year on a jar of paté - the year printed as a block about 3mmx1.2mm white on black closely kerned text which made telling 2006 from 2008 a little tricky.
My 46th birthday isn't for a couple of weeks yet; but on Saturday, going up to London, in a train crowded by Japanese language students (i.e. young Japanese learning English in England), there was nowhere to sit. So after a while of standing in the aisle, one of the youngsters got up to offer me his seat. This is worrying.
But then one of the stopover hotels on our spring holiday, we were charged the Senior Citizens rate for dinner (which, frankly, was all that it was worth).
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