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“neatly spatchcocked and self-served with lashings of smugness”
Excellent hatchet-job.

Thud: ILE
Words: 1890
Total words: 62494
Files: 3
Tea: Jasmine
Music: NMPA
RSI: Not so good.
Reason for stopping: end of that bit.

Going forward.

I like writing so much more than not writing. I'm so much happier and have so much more energy. It's regrettable that not writing sometimes seems to be part of the process. But just now, writing.

Thanks (I think) to everyone who sent me the link to the person who marked up a library copy of Farthing to take the alternate history out. Some people are very peculiar. I still maintain that we should hold off on the brain-wipe until the second offence.

Ha'Penny review.

3:00 snapshot, #304

the doors are open.
i might escape.

No time to unpack
Lots of stuff has happened in the past couple of days: lovely friend stuff, very good and slightly bad work stuff, political stuff, etc. The metaphor for what should be happening in my head is something along the lines of defragmenting or Tetris or something. But I can't take any time out to think about everything because I'm off to London tonight to find the exam centre and stay with my sister, then tomorrow it's exams.
They've moved the bloody exam centre, so I need to get there this evening and find it so that I'll be able to find it again tomorrow morning without using up too much brainspace.

barnacle has translated my map into some nice verbal directions, so it shouldn't be too bad. But in the meantime I need to pack and write some copy for the newspaper and revise. My head is full of lists: keys mobile oyster card, house of lords fostering parole board, theatre review local elections article, ministerial responsibility formula spending share poll tax, etc, etc.
I'll be back and posting again when I'm not feeling quite so crazed. In the mean time, Life Peerages Act 19ohhellwhenwasit, turn left at the bridge, Maastricht Treaty, remember to go to the toilet whenever you can.

Current Mood: confused

Incremental steps towards the cure for cancer
This is actually something that happened a few months ago, but I didn't blog about it then because I wasn't sure how public the information was. Anyway, my former Boss S, who supervised me during my PhD, showed up in Stockholm. I went to hear her talk, being curious to know what had happened to the project I started after I left. And it turns out that she's achieved some pretty stunning stuff.

She's found two drugs with clinical potential, and one of them turns out to be an inhibitor of something called a sirtuin. Sirtuins are super, super trendy right now; they're involved in marking the DNA at a level which is termed epigenetic. They also seem to play a major role in ageing, as well as being master controllers of which genes are expressed.

She's got a very nice paper in Cancer Cell which comes out this week. Unfortunately Cell Press are still operating on the model of making people pay to read articles, so you'll only be able to see it if you're in an academic institution. But anyway, the point is that it's very satisfying to feel that the work I did was the starting point of a project that has real, practical results, that may even help to make patients better.

Boss S' career is going very well at the moment, with this work and some other impressive achievements in the past few years. There's a possibility she might take up a position here in my institute, which would be rather cool, especially as she'd likely be working with the people I collaborate with anyway. I managed to feed her dinner and catch up on some of the gossip from Dundee, so I'm pleased that worked out.

Thinking of this has given me a motivation boost to get on with the stuff I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. So I'll leave LJ and get back to that.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: The Prodigy: No good (start the dance)

Biting the spoon that feeds
At least I didn't say: "Hello! I'm back! I can't possibly scroll through fifty pages of unread flist, so I'm relying on you lovely people to tell me in comments what's been happening!"

However, I did contact the BBC and ask them to summarise the past fortnight's news in waterproof picture book form. But apparently that wasn't Reithian enough for them.

Monday
Slept about eleven hours last night, and woke up so stiff that getting dressed was a challenge, but it loosened up once I got moving.

Wrote a page or so of rough notes for a new story this evening.

Now I need to go and sleep some more, I think.

Current Mood: content

Docklands Waterfowl

Crested Grebe 3
Originally uploaded by Simon Bradshaw

More pictures of the coots and crested grebes nesting on Millwall Inner Dock.

( Pictures - click on each to enlarge )

the plan
Leave Sydney 1:55pm 21 May
Arrive San Fran 10:15 am 21 May
(I love travel that takes me back in time)

Spend two days talking to NVIDIA and listening to them smack talk about Intel.

Spend the weekend, and as much of Friday as possible with the lovely

applez.

Fly out of San Fran 10:40pm Sun 25 May
Land in Sydney 6:20am Tuesday 27 May

Fly to Japan 4th June?
Fly back 6th June?
Something like that...

CanCon
Julie Couillard is no Gerda Munsinger. I demand a higher quality of security-related scandal from our elected officials.

It angers me more than almost anything else that I've essentially nothing to contribute to cultural life. I've tried all kinds of things over the years and haven't really shown any real spark at anything. I guess it's a sign of desperation that I keep on trying.

I seem to be good at something I don't really give a damn about, and that seems to make me better at it: I installed a Shibboleth2 IdP and SP to an LDAP server with a custom schema, and attached that to DSpace using a quickly written stackable authenticator, set up an X509 CA, and got client certificates working through to Tomcat, in two days. Our customers budgeted for four months full time. And yet I don't give a damn. If it is all going up in flames right now, I really don't care. If someone bombed us all to the stone age, it would't bother me.

Yet I scribble some naff thing that a nine year old could draw, or write something unpublishable, and I get so angry that I have no relevant skills, and can beat myself up over it for weeks, months sometimes. I don't write for years on end because I get so angry at the poverty of my writing.

When I think about self-image, I most often think of the ox. Partly because people have always said I can be stubborn to the point of imbecility, but mainly because of that phrase about the ox "bovine with an education", which I always thinks fits me quite well. I remember

3c66b quoting something from way back when, about how Oxford men had natural grace and poise, but that Cambridge men had a certain bovine persistence. I've never been a leader, and have no inclination or desire to be such. But it can be difficult finding pride in an oxish life sometimes.

Sometimes I'd like to express myself. And I mean that in a sense beyond wood finishes. I know that it's a sign of immaturity, but there it is, that's me.

It's one of the few introspective things that can still make me cry and feel sorry for myself. Which is more than a bit stupid.

I'm more than a bit tired of lj and social networking in general: we all just go around in circles.

(Comments off to avoid any feeling of necessity of consolation).

Poetry of the Marches
( These are from the Lifelode universe )

Letter from the hospital
I just spent a few minutes filling out a survey on what I thought of my hospital care. I told them I was mostly pleased, with specifics: for example, that the person who drew my blood was reasonably skilled and very polite and considerate. I also took the opportunity to mention the time I had to ask the night nurses to close my door so I could sleep through their loud chat; the one nurse who was quite demanding that I acknowledge her in the terms she felt appropriate after she had awakened me for no other reason; and that lukewarm water plus a teabag does not equal tea. Also that the OR staff were particularly good at explanations of both procedures and delays. I think my most serious complaint was about the discharge nurse, which I've posted about here: that she was too focused on "everyone should eat a lowfat diet with more fish" to give me information specific to my condition, even in terms of "standard post-gall-bladder-removal instructions." (I wouldn't really expect specifics based on my vital signs.) I'm glad to have given them some potentially useful information. I left a few questions blank (they said to skip those that don't apply), including whether they'd cared for my spiritual needs (since there was no space for "no, because I didn't have any") and how I would rate the cheerfulness of the hospital.

When I saw the return address on the envelope, my first thought was that it was a bill, for the emergency room copayment if nothing else. (I had expected to be asked for that amount when I was admitted, since my insurance card says how much it should be.) As an incentive to return the surveys, they say that one person a week who does so will win a $200 Amex gift check.

Parallel Worlds
Conceivably there's one where the BBC could do a documentary on the subject and mention written sf.

(No disrespect to

rozk and others who appeared on it, but if they made mention of anything other than film or TV, it ended up on the cutting room floor.)

books
My parents lent me one Josephine Tay book, and gave me another (they'd accidentally acquired a spare).

Josephine Tay wrote crime novels in the late 40's and early 50's. That suggests a certain kind of material, but in practice what you actually get is something very unexpected - a combination of detailed analysis of the comparatively mundane, and the most sharply perceptive and acerbic writing I've read in ages. Every paragraph drips knowing understanding of human frailty.

The writing style takes a bit of getting used to; it's sufficiently old-fashioned to be slightly awkward to go at, and has the odd habit of quoting words or phrases that seem a natural part of the language now, but were presumably comparatively new coinings at the time of writing.

I've completed "Miss Pym Disposes", which turns out to be far darker than you are led to expect, and am currently half way through "The Franchise Affair", wondering which way I'm going to mis-guess the obvious plot twist.

They're not going to be to everyone's tastes, but she's definitely shot into my top-several list of authors I'm impressed by.

Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on Puppies, Kittens
Of course, as Milbank points out; they voted for them before they voted against them.

It's more of the obstructionist trickery they've been doing, and which, in the senate, I wish Reid had the balls to make them really stand up and do.... No need to close the Senate down for good on one issue, I think that would be counterproductive, but everytime they threaten a filibuster, make 'em do it for 24 hours. Then bring the next piece of legislation they want to kill to the floor, and make 'em do it again.

Every couple of weeks, hold the session open into the weekend.

Giving them weapons ("look at how they can't get any laws passed) is stupid.

But know we know where the party of, "Family Values" stands on Mom... she's just another conventiant prop to be used for petty positional posturing.

Remembering Birthdays: Louise Katheryne Sullivan
May 12th was Louise Katheryne Sullivan's birthday. If I'm remembering the year correctly, she would have turned 49 today if all of the considerable efforts to treat her depression had yielded better results than they did. I'm pretty sure she was a '59 baby....

What I know for certain is that she was a wonderful human being and I was blessed to share friendship and family ties with her for what turned out to be far too short a number of years. Thanks to Louise, getting lost while driving rarely upsets me. Thanks to Louise, I marvel at the power of thunderstorms. Thanks to Louise, I know and am friends with Sandy Williams, who has also served as my attorney since I moved to Massachusetts.

Thanks to Louise, I knew...Louise. And that was treasure enough. The 27 years since she died have been a long strange trip, indeed. Strange and wondrous. I have carried her in memory and in my heart every step of the way and trust I will continue to do so through everything still ahead.

3:00 snapshot, #303

Sweet Rats, Sweet Blood
RAT NEWS: And pictures! Rosie's surgery went well, but she tore her stitches out--pictures of her in burritos* show beautiful Mother's Day flowers sent by Nephew and our ratsies, obviously with help from eldersib and youngersib--and our new girl, Black Orchid.

* The rat burrito is a wrap to keep rats from tearing out stitches; the e-collar doesn't work very well on rats.

HEALTH: Today I went to my doctor for the high blood-glucose. This gave me the courage to take my fasting, which was, eep, 222. On the other hand, my hbA1c a few weeks ago was 7.5, which is not optimum (6.5 or 7.0) but not so bad. This means that either my fasting is bad but my peaks not so bad (the opposite of how problems usually go) or I've only been having these high values for a short time. Either is good news, considering; he's doing another hbA1c from blood drawn today, and we'll see what that says. My cholesterol and triglycerides were good.

My GP once again asked about bariatric surgery, but I really can only imagine choosing that option if my diabetes cannot be controlled by any other means (which seems unlikely). So we're adding Januvia. We're also trying a lower dose of Actos, which will probably still be effective but less likely to cause weight gain.

I frankly had hoped I'd walk out with a scrip for Byetta as well, but (1) my doctor is not that familiar with it and rarely prescribes it, and (2) he likes to make one change at a time, which does make sense. He's willing to go to Byetta next, which I think certainly seems better than combining injected insulin with the other meds, which he also mentioned.

In the meantime, I don't feel bad in any other way, just get tired too easily. Today shows that I can get enough sleep, but it's hours more than even my usual ten per night. Well, I can just plan to get that much sleep, until my new meds work out; it's even a relatively slack time at work.

One personal goal for my medical palette is to maximize diabetic control while minimizing both weight-gain and hypoglycemic attacks. It seems Januvia is good for that, and I think Byetta is also.

Mood: informed, now-rested, caffeinated

Equal Ops in SF
Mooching. Found useful info at Broad Universe

The awards list is out of date but suggests a steady improvement towards some kind of parity (in terms of women in the field generally).

More unpleasant is the Locus list of reviewers and what they reviewed. It shows pretty clearly that the paucity of female reviewers is a real problem. It's out of date of course, but I'd be very surprised if it had changed much. I suspect the bulge in Diverse Hands is because they *used* to have quite a lot of women there.

By their fruits shall ye know them
Discworld

More melon-carving party photos.

A trivia question
Something Americans are not very good at is withholding approval for their own elected heads of government. An approval rating close to 30% sounds bad in an American context, down there with the lowest ratings Nixon managed. In a wider context, that rating is practically popular success, at least compared with Brian Mulroney's approval ratings in the early 1990s (11%). The NDP even managed to explore the single-digit approval space, thanks to two simultaneous inept provincial NDP governments.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel appears to have hit lows of about 3% approval. Is that a world record for an elected leader or has someone ever pulled off a 2%, 1% or that Mount Everest of imploding administrations, 0% approval?

Cheese shop
G&Ds had run out of ice cream! Feh!

F*** f*** f***
A few days ago the wind blew my parking permit off the dashboard, and I came back to find a fine on my car. After much swearing, I realized that the permit has been issued to the other car, and so I had no way to prove that I was actually parking the car legally. The permit expires at the end of May, so I have to go to the parking shop and get a new one (for less money, note), and I thought that I would do it One of This Days, Really Soon. Meanwhile I gritted my teeth and paid my 50 pounds and made damn sure the parking ticket was visible through the windshield.

Today I come home, after having been sent home from work 1 and a half hour early (this had Not Put Me In A Good Mood, because we have been working 6:30, 7 hours max for the past two months, and it is getting to the point where we have a 500 shortfall by the end of the month, even if we do NOT, like I have, get a flue and stay home for three weeks), and what do I find?

A parking ticket. I looked at the car, incredolous, and yes, the permit is clearly visible in the same place were it's always been, in the car dashboard.

I just want to cry.