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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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7:04pm on Friday, 3rd July, 2009:

Adieu, Portsmouth

Anecdote

Today I went to Portsmouth University to be an external examiner for the last time. They have a 5-year limit on externals, and this was my fifth year. Today's Award Board meeting, which I attended as Chief External Examiner, was my final duty.

There are some things about Portsmouth's way of doing things that are a little bizarre from an Essex University point of view. For example, they calculate what each student's final grade is three different ways (average, 60/40 third/second-year split, preponderance of grades) and use whichever they get the highest in; this seems rather generous. However, to get an honours degree, the students must not fail any modules; this seems rather harsh. However, if a student only fails one module worth 20 credits or less but made a reasonable attempt at it, then the exam board can let them through (which we did in almost every case); this seems rather lenient again. The result of all this is that out of the several hundred students who graduated, only a handful got third class degrees — it's really hard to score between 40% and 50% on all three methods without failing a module.

Needless to say, now that the Computer Games degree has been running for 5 years and is a well-oiled machine, Portsmouth University as a whole is reorganising how it does its teaching (dropping the semester format) and they'll have to reconstruct all their courses. Luckily for me, I won't be there to see what's still standing when the smoke clears.

Five years is a long time to be visiting a place two or three times a year. When I started, this building was only just rising from its foundations:

I like the fact that Portsmouth has got round any accusations that tall buildings are essentially phallic structures by making this one look like a lipstick.

The big surprise for me was that at the end of the examiners' meeting, I got a going-away present! This is it:

It's a map of Portsmouth dating from the mid-1800s. I found it immediately interesting because although Southsea seems to loom large in Portsmouth's geography, it doesn't get a mention on the map — Portsea does, but there's no Southsea. It's signed on the back by all the academics whose courses I have been criticising for the past 5 years, too.

I'm very pleased with it! Someone must have been reading my blog to find out what I liked, and it paid off.

I shall recommend to my success that he or she cultivate the impression of being a collector of Rolls Royces.

4:29pm on Thursday, 2nd July, 2009:

Mrs Fields Cookie Tin

Anecdote

My younger daughter wanted to take some chocolate eat things she'd made to school yesterday, so she asked my wife for a suitable tin in which to put them.

This is what my wife gave her:

That is an old Mrs Fields Cookie tin. The label on it is from the last time it was used. It says, "Jennifer Bartle (Age 4)". My elder daughter had made some buns for a competition, and they'd been put in this tin for transportation.

She's 19 next week. That tin has remained unused for nearly 15 years.

Yet my wife complains because I keep serviceable stuff indefinitely, just in case I might need it ... mutter ... grumble ... .

4:17pm on Thursday, 2nd July, 2009:

Luncheon of the Boating Party

Comment

There's a painting by Renoir called Luncheon of the Boating Party (well, Le Déjeuner des Canotiers) that I know very well. The reason I know it very well is because it's stuck to the ceiling of the dental surgery I go to.

I was there yesterday, having fillings in my two front teeth (with no anaesthetic — no pain either, though, I'm not that brave). I mentioned to the dentist that her painting was getting a little dog-eared, and suggested that she might replace it with, oh, a flat-screen TV. She then launched into a tirade complaining about the costs of dentistry, how she'd bought an upgrade to her dental software that wasn't compatible with the £8,000 worth of mouth cameras she'd got a year ago, and how she couldn't afford it.

Hmm, my other dentist (the one who handles my implant) won't put a flat screen TV on his ceiling either, although admittedly his is 2 metres further away than my regular dentist's because his surgery is in an old Victorian house whereas hers is in something so old it has a half-timbered frame.

Yesterday, though, I had an idea. Dentists could contact local artists and display their work for sale on the surgery ceiling. They would take a cut of any sales made. This would give them (yet) more income, and offer patients something to look at while they're having their incisors subjected to an ultra-violet resin-hardening gun (at least until it slips and tans their gum).

I put this to my dentist, but she didn't like the idea that it might fall down like her Boating Party picture does. I tried to explain that unlike her poster, these would not be held up with aging blu-tack, but then she started to tell me how the procedure she was about to start on my teeth was her favourite of all dental procedures and she'd been looking forward to doing it for days.

Still, it's a basically a sound idea. Maybe I could try something along similar lines with my students? I could hang paintings on the windows when I'm about to give a lecture — it's where they spend most of their time looking.

Ah, there's a flaw, though: they're students, they don't have any money to spend on paintings (just alcohol and, occasionally, food). Oh well...

5:43pm on Wednesday, 1st July, 2009:

Teenage Daughter's Bedroom

Comment

Metaplace has come up with a system by which you can embed its virtual worlds (including ones you create yourself) on web pages. Here's my first effort, Teenage Daughter's Bedroom:

OK, so it isn't actually a virtual world, it's a shapes-moving puzzle game. I figured that if I wanted to know how the system worked, the quickest way would be to try make it do something it wasn't designed for (in this case, duplicate a simple JavaScript game I wrote several years ago). Oddly, the hardest part was getting it to be single-player rather than multi-player (and it stil only becomes single-player a third of a second after you start..!).

Hmm, maybe if I'd have know the dimensions of the embedded screen when I started, I'd have made the help window a small enough so it all actually fitted and you could see the buttons that move through it ... and exit it (sigh).

I think maybe I'll try a board game next.

1:57pm on Wednesday, 1st July, 2009:

On the Same Page

Weird

This was part of the same Guardian article I mentioned in the previous QBlog post:

They really ought to change their default caption text so it's more obvious. Journalists might spot it before going to print, and I might spot it before looking through the paper a second time over lunch.

What really ought to happen is that the composition software shouldn't allow it to be sent to the presses if it's missing a caption, of course...

9:16am on Wednesday, 1st July, 2009:

Germany

Weird

In today's Guardian there is a big map with boxes pointing to various countries on it, explaining how they deal with Internet censorship. Here's the one for Germany:

That would be the Germany in Italy?

5:12pm on Tuesday, 30th June, 2009:

User-Created Content

Weird

Seen on a noticeboard on the floor 5 corridor leading to the Computer Science block:

The picture is at an angle and not entirely in focus, but it serves to show what students who have completed their exams are willing to do with drawing pins to pass the time.

1:22pm on Monday, 29th June, 2009:

Missing Words

Outburst

I like lime, and occasionally buy lime cordial to drink. It's always lime cordial, though, not lime squash. The only other flavours that are a cordial rather than a squash are elderflower and peppermint; everything else is orange squash, lemon squash, apple and blackcurrant squash, orange and pineapple squash etc.. Even if it's 50% juice, it's still "high-juice squash".

I'm sure there's some complex packaging legislation that makes a precise distinction between what makes a drink that you add water to in order to render it drinkable either a squash or a cordial; however, I've no idea what that distinction is.

Anyway, at the weekend I went for some lime cordial and saw this:

Lime squash? Oh wow! I had to try that!

Here are the ingredients as listed on the back:

The flash has whited out some of it, so here's what the ingredients are in full:

water
organic cane sugar
organic limes
citric acid

Now there are some words missing from this list of ingredients. Can you guess what they are?

Yes, that's right: before the words "organic cane sugar" it should say "nowhere near enough".

Jeez, it's more bitter than bitter lemon — and that's supposed to be bitter!

Lime cordial it is from now on, then...

11:03am on Sunday, 28th June, 2009:

Where I Work #9

Anecdote

Continuing the occasional series...

This is the bottom shelf of the unit behind me to the left:

It's where I keep various pieces of hardware, plus magazines I want to keep which are awaiting transfer to the netherworld that is: The Attic.

It was intended for oddly-shaped items used only occasionally — a document-binding kit, a hand-held microphone (of such an impedence level that it only works if you shout into it), a dust-cover for a keyboard that I'm sure some company probably still makes. The blue thing, though, is a paper guillotine that my kids have taken a shine to, so it gets taken out quite frequently for trimming things down so they fit in school project books and for making stuff. Needless to say, they are no better at getting it out than they are at putting it away, which is why one of the copies of Develop isn't in the pile where it should be. I have every copy of Develop ever issued, which I keep in the belief that one day they will be worth enough to fund my retirement.

Hmm, I think maybe I'll have to increase the speed at which I produce this occasional series, as my wife's period moans about the state of the office have increased in frequency recently; it may be she's running out of other parts of the house to redecorate to her specifications, so is turning her attention here. That will screw up my attempts to document my working environment no end...

4:59pm on Saturday, 27th June, 2009:

Gardening for the Non-Gardener

Comment

I don't like gardening. Sure, you get a nice garden out of it, but it sounds to me suspiciously like hard work. As a result of this lack of engagement with gardening, I don't know much about it at all. Nor do I want to know much about it; that would mean I'd have to take an in interest in it, and then I'd feel obliged to put the knowledge to some practical use.

This does not mean I don't want a nice-looking garden, though. It simply means I want a nice-looking garden without having to be any good at nor have any aptitude for gardening.

So, our garden could do with some more plants. If I buy plants and plant them, though, they will die. This is because plants are fussy, fragile things that will only grow in the right conditions. I don't know those conditions. Well, I do know them, because they come with instructions that say "prefers partial shade, well-drained slightly alkaline soil in a sheltered position facing south". I've said before, I don't want any of this stuff. I want "grows near where your lawn has clover in it" or "just put it next to your roses".

A few years ago, I bought some rhubarb seeds. I like rhubarb. I know it likes some weird combination of conditions that come together in a small area of Yorkshire, but I don't know which part of our garden corresponds to that small part of Yorkshire. Rather than try figure out the pH of our soil and whether proximity to some shrub consituted enough shade to be partial, I just planted the seeds in a variety of places — under trees, next to the shed, in among the flowers — and waited for the results.

The results were that they grew where we'd planted our strawberries. Then, they shrivelled up under the day-long direct sunlight and died. So, right soil, wrong kind of sun. This means I ought to be able to plant them nearby, maybe in a hedge or next to where the previous occupants of the house had placed a brick barbecue so badly constructed that it was years before we realised that it was, in fact, meant to be a barbecue. Unfortunately, my every attempt to grow rhubarb in these locations has resulted in the young plants' being lifted by my father-in-law and put next to the strawberries where they grow like crazy until they die of thirst. No attempts to persuade him not to do it have worked (he remembers that there's something about the rhubarb and the strawberries, but seems to think that it's that I want the rhubarb there, not that i don't want it there).

Hmm. I wonder if maybe watering the rhubarb might keep it alive longer? It's a crazy idea, but it might just work...

2:43pm on Friday, 26th June, 2009:

It's Balsamic

Weird

From a packet of Walker's Sensations®:

It's always good to know that the crisps you're eating are made with real ingredients, rather than pretend ones.

3:03pm on Thursday, 25th June, 2009:

New Dishwasher

Anecdote

We got a new dishwasher today. It's a Siemens.

Here are the loading instructions:

Phew! I was wondering where I was going to put our spinach stuff.

1:34pm on Wednesday, 24th June, 2009:

Grass

Weird

I went to London yesterday to have lunch with Randy Farmer and his wife. I took them to My Old Dutch, where they had Moroccan lamb stew in a pancake. I'm sure they'll recover in time.

Anyway, on the way there I took this photograph at Colchester station:

Looks like they need to mow that kerb more often...

Contrast this with the lawns in Lincoln's Inn, near where Randy and his wife were staying:

You could play snooker on that.

It would seem there's more money in being a lawyer than in running a railway.

9:58am on Tuesday, 23rd June, 2009:

Speaker Power

Anecdote

John Bercow has been elected as speaker of the House of Commons.

Amazingly, I actually know him. Well, I was acquainted with him — and I doubt he'll remember me. He was a contemporary of mine at Essex University in the 1980s. I particularly recall an election for the Student Union president in which he got something like 300 votes in the first round (more than 100 more than the second-placed Labour student), but lost out because of the single transferable vote system (or "my seventh choice beats your first choice"). That didn't happen in the speaker elections yesterday, though, and he's now become one of the university's most famous alumni at a stroke.

Back in the 1980s, Essex University was a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. As a science student, I kept out of it as much as I could, but it was everywhere. John Bercow, as leader of the Young Conservatives, was well known and well despised by most of the student activists, partly because he seemed to go out of his way to say things that he knew would annoy them. He seemed to have let this desire to wind people up go to his head when he left Essex, as he rose through the ranks of the Conservative party by taking a very right-wing stance. It was particularly weird that he was secretary of the Monday Club's immigration and repatriation committee when he himself is Jewish.

Since then, he's undergone something of a transformation (which I believe is genuine). He dismayed the parliamentary Conservatives, but endeared himself to many (me included), when he put party politics aside and agreed to produce a review on the problems of children with communication difficulties. He's been very principled and independently-minded as an MP (voting to allow homosexual couples to marry, in defiance of a three-line whip, and then resigning from the front bench in protest). No wonder many Conservatives dislike him.

I'm quite pleased, though. He may have been abrasive as a student, but he wasn't entirely a prat. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say he has the potential to become a great speaker — if the rest of the House of Commons lets him.

9:37am on Monday, 22nd June, 2009:

James Bond Lollipop

Weird

Here's a picture from the Hornsea and District Post of a new James Bond Lollipop:

Hmm, they didn't think that stick positioning through, did they? Either that, or the secret of his success with women is now revealed...

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Copyright © 2009 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).