We’re continuing to enjoy HBO’s Game of Thrones series. The opening sequence is an exceptional piece of work – a highly stylized animation that not only serves to deliver the necessary opening titles but also gives a sense of the scale and setting of the story. Absolutely amazing:
Mealsnap iPhone app impressions
The diet hasn’t gotten off to the best start – perhaps starting it the day ahead of the weekend was a bad idea – but I did try out my diet-tracking website’s new £1.79 iPhone app – Mealsnap – which takes a photo of your meal and tells you the calorie count from – I assume – some kind of clever algorithmic photo-analysis and by referencing the food database from Dailyburn.
First impressions, from three or four photographed meals:
- It does sometimes work quite well – correctly (near as damn) recognizing what’s on your plate, and giving sensible caloric estimates
- There is quite a range for the estimates – as I’m not sure it has any meaningful way of working out how big a piece of bread, for instance, is.
- It doesn’t integrate into Dailyburn, so whatever calorie records you make stay in the app .This renders it completely pointless for me.
- It takes an age to ‘process’ the photos – so long that it’s easy to imagine that the photos are being uploaded, and being manually viewed and assessed by a warehouse full of monkeys somewhere.
So I think I’ll leave it alone for now. Anyone worked out any other positives?
Speech patterns and adoptive phrases
My parents have been visiting and were amused to hear me use the word ‘crikey’ the other day. My mum’s a professor of socio-linguistics so finds all this stuff fascinating.
Now I happen to remember exactly why this particular word is in my vocabulary – I used to try to do an impression of the inestimable Steve Irwin (it was terrible) for no reason other than I thought he was occasionally hilarious – and say "crikey, don’t troy this at home, kids. if he boites me Oi’m dead."
Given that the majority of that phrase doesn’t have much cause to enter every day conversation, ‘crikey’ is all that remains. By the same token my brother, over the years, has taken to saying tomay-toes instead of tomatoes – he picked a way of saying something, liked it, and it stuck.
Is this how linguistic drift happens? Or this, and the OED adding acronyms to itself?
Babies and personal space
One of the things that’s taken the most getting used to with Emily for me is understanding the need to respect her personal space. With other people’s babies I’ve known in the past, there’s been a lot of play, cuddles, bouncing, etc., apparently on our own terms. With Em, we’ve become incredibly aware of the need to let her mark out her own boundaries for play.
We’ve been disciplined about it – never thinking or speaking of her as ‘baby’ but always as Emily (or various unspeakably cute variations on that theme). And as she develops and her personality continues to present itself, it’s been amazing to watch her dictate the terms of engagement with other people.
The other day, my dad tried to pick her up for a cuddle before she was quite ready for him and I suggested he hold back, and just hold his arms out and smile at her. Sure enough, Emily sized him up, stuck her arms out and leapt into his arms for a bit of a play.
Wonderful to see.
Neil Gaiman wrote a Doctor Who, who knew?
One of my favourite episodes from the current series of Dr Who – the Doctor’s wife – was written by one of my favourite writers – the incalculable, inestimable Neil Gaiman. It’s really interesting to read his Q&A on it and get some insight into his collaborative creative process with Steven Moffat (spoilers therein).
To which Steven replied,
Love the tattoo and the arm and the recycled monsters – but we can we make the Corsair sound less like the man the Doctor modeled himself on? Answers too many question that should be left alone. He’s the Doctor, he does what he does for reasons too vast and terrible to relate.
Which when put like that was absolutely unarguable-with.
Fantastic stuff. Trailer here, for people that missed the episode:
Getting feedback from our readers at The Cambridge Student
When @damiankahya and I took on the editorial reigns of The Cambridge Student newspaper in 1999/2000, we stood on a platform of sweeping change and reform…. and, erm, well, mainly incremental improvement. One of the promises we made to secure the exalted and revered roles of editors-in-chief was to bring the paper online. After all, it was the dawn of a new millennium.
WordPress, however, and its fellow open-source CMS kin, were just twinkles in the eyes of their creators – and so we persuaded our friend (and Science Editor), codename ‘Horney’, to build a system for us from scratch. Which he did an admiral job of – and gave us a platform that provided us with some more instant feedback – primitive, article-specific reader stats. It was great to get this in an environment where we hardly ever received letters to the editor, and where comments, Tweets and ‘sharethis’ links were just a little too far into the future, never mind Google Analytics.
However, Horney had a more effective way of eliciting a response from his readers. In a classic example of ‘knowing your reader’ (and before the Internet ruined it for everybody), Horney would publish a ‘mindbender’ puzzle as a regular recurring feature. Sometimes physics or mathematics related, but more often just an absolute brain muddle, the puzzle elicited responses with the tantalising promise a piece of cheap confectionary of Horney’s choosing for the quickest or most elegant solution delivered by email. Dozens of readers would have responses to us within a few hours of the papers hitting the colleges on a Thursday morning.
Idle students? Or did Horney just gauge the target audience well?
The column doesn’t seem to have endured, telling us nothing (in fact, a science page seems to be missing from the pages of the latest edition of TCS). Maybe we just struck it lucky? Or maybe the current editors of TCS can’t stretch to the inflation busting cost of chocolate bars today, or are once against facing off against the arts/sciences journalism schism…
Sidebar: the application for the roles of editors-in-chiefs at TCS is a 400 word statement including relevant experience. I still have the 52 page plan that Damian and I developed, complete with design mock-ups, to win the top jobs. Young people these days…
Stowe’s soup poison scandal
Bizarre story in the Guardian – apparently:
Stowe school chef tells court she saw kitchen porter poisoning soup
Drama lives on in those green and pleasant lands.
Incidentally, inflation seems to have hit my alma mater hard – full fees when I was there (and I was on a scholarship when I was there, I hasten to add) were closer to £12,000 a year. Even with compounded interest rates at 4% over the 13 years since I left the fees should be closer to £20,000 a year than £27,000. Accurate inflation calculation puts the figure at closer to £16,000. How come public school education is racing ahead of inflation?
Wii U?
Ok, hat tip to @patrickyiu and @geowgeow on this one – this thing is just plain weird, and if it wasn’t June I’d assume it was an April Fool’s gag. Nintendo has gone from having a console with virtually no controller to one with the world’s biggest controller…
I have no idea if this is genius or idiocy. I’m inclined – along with Nintendo’s shareholders – to the latter.
Experimenting with Waitrose online
We tried out Waitrose online, on some prompting from friends. The free delivery is great… but the online e-commerce system feels a few years behind Ocado and even Tesco.com. No automated lists, limited personalisation and slow load times make the experience slightly agonising, even in a very fast browser (Chrome, obv). There also seems to be a significantly smaller product range than you’d find on Ocado.
It’s not without its positive features: the shopping basket is very good, as is the offer browser and product information screens. It’s just the actual process of shopping that is a bit too slow and fiddly.
I’m hoping that Waitrose can keep me posted of developments to the site as the Ocado delivery charges are steep and I’m not sure Amanda is sufficiently convinced of the virtues of online grocery shopping to agree to a scheduled commitment (which comps delivery on Ocado).
What do other people think? In store, online, and who with? This is all part of my bid to escape the supermarket lottery of life, which has us stuck with local Tesco stores…
Novel writing and word counts
Over the course of my sabbatical, despite initial enthusiasm and mind-map fun, I lost steam for the longstanding dream of writing a novel. The process seemed too complex and beyond the time and word count capabilities of a working dad with too many other hobbies.
However, as my obsessive blogging over the last couple of months has demonstrated, I’m capable of churning out a few words on the commute, on blog-friendly topics, AND research them, link to them, tweet about them etc. Out of curiosity as to exactly how prolific I had been, I installed a word count plugin, which revealed that, of the 210,000 words or so I’ve produced in the last 8 or so years of blogging, an astonishing 38,000 were produced in the last four months – 22,000 of which in the month and a half after I returned from sabbatical.
Which was a bit higher than I expected.
I might think about opening a new Evernote with story ideas and see if I can build up a head of steam blogging simple short stories… and if those go nowhere, finally write off [sic] the idea… I might even wheel out the writer’s block….