QBlog

Where I Work #16

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Continuing the occasional series...

Below the shelf with the boxes on is this shelf. It's one of two that hold stationery (the other is below it, as we'll see next time). It's a big taller than it needs to be, so there's a lot of wasted space; one of these days I'll move it up a rung and the shelf beneath it too, which will release more space where I need it for my computer games (two shelves below, as we'll see next next time).

The pile on the left is made up of card, transparencies, coloured paper, labels, pads, !4 notebooks, document wallet sleeves and a few smaller notebooks I've put on top. It also has some more exotic items such as carbon paper (all at least 30 years old, and some possibly from the 1950s), tracing paper and graph paper. This is where, when my kids would show up without notice and demand something bizarre they needed for homework, I'd probably find it.

The next pile has some more A4 books (quite nice ones that I intend to use but have never thought of anything important enough to want to use them for). There are more transparencies, more A4 pads and some smaller pads an notebooks that I take with me every once in a while. That small shoebox at the top contains my spare batteries; it doesn't actualy go there but on the shelf below, I'll move it...

Next to this pile is a green box and four notecard boxes. The green box contains everything I need to wrap up presents (except regular, clear sticky tape, which is on the shelf below). There are scissors, a hand-held zip-along cutter, pens that write on anything, sharp-bladed paper knives, novelty sticky tape, large rolls of sticky tape left over from last century before I bought a proper dispenser that uses smaller rolls, and glue. The glue isn't paper glue (I chucked that out ages ago when it dried up); it's superglue, used for when my mother presents me with the latest ornament/plate/cup she has broken while dusting. I also have the solvent I need to get superglue off my hands in that box, too. I suppose I shouldn't really keep superglue there as it doesn't really fit with the present-wrapping theme, but "it's where I keep my glue" so that's where it is. I have some polystyrene cement in there, too.

The four notecard boxes behind the green box contain records of my classical music cassette tape collection. If I want to find some piece that is on a compilation, this is where I'll look. So long as I got it before about 1995, there's probably a sheet for it. In fact, there will be several sheets, as I wrote a program to generate several sheets for each piece, ordered by composer (or composers) and name (or names) of the piece. Some of the records — all of which are on paper rather than card — are on lineprinter paper, from the days when I was a PhD student. I'll maybe show you a few sometime. The collection isn't complete because I lost track of the tapes I hadn't indexed when we moved house about 15 years ago; besides, the program I wrote (well, rewrote — I had versions for the DEC-10, Atari ST and MSDOS) stopped working with Windows 98.

Finally, the pile on the right contains assorted envelopes, paper bags andcard so thick that it qualifies as being board. If I need some brown paper to wrap up a parcel for posting, this is where I'll look if the roll of brown paper at the top of the cabinet to the left has run out. Behind the paper are some index cards bought in Los Angeles in 1995.

Oh, I like stationery, by the way. If I ever come into crazy amounts of money, I shall be buying as wide a variety as I can just so I can own it...

Ominous Signs

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I've been thinking about getting a new PC for the past couple of months, but this week the desire to get one has become more pressing. When I switch it on first thing in the morning, the screen on my monitor flickers. It continues to flicker for several minutes (longer and longer each day) until it eventually stabilises and looks normal. I suspect it's a power supply problem.

The reason I didn't buy a PC earlier was because I was reading stuff and writing stuff and didn't want to disrupt anything or I'd miss deadlines. Just as I was getting close to finishing, I got asked to write a book chapter for an academic LOTRO anthology. I've almost finished this, but have now got a request to make changes to a chapter I wrote for a different book, based on the talk I gave in Magdeburg last year. Meanwhile I have a dissertation, two theses and a movie script I've promised to read. If I get a new PC, it'll be days before I can use it for anything worthwhile as I transfer over all the stuff from my current PC. Yet if I don't, it could be that next time I switch it on, it doesn't come on.

I guess I'd better hit the mail order PC web sites...

Hubb Huh?

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

There was an interview in this week's MCV with Melanie Jones, European Sales Director of Hubb.

Yes, this is the same MCV and the same Hubb that you may recall I mentioned with regards to last week's "want to see more?" ad.

Well, if it was placed there by a department headed by a woman, I guess that makes it unsexist after all (except in its assumption that men will buy anything in response to titillation, but that rarely seems to count).

Is it just me, or does that model in the ad look like she has two belly-buttons?

Bumpy Ride

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I read in the paper this morning that there are an estimated 2,000,000 potholes in British roads.

Well, having just driven the two miles from our house to the chip shop in Eight Ash Green, I'm wondering where the other 8 are.

Sweet Deal

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

With its being Mother's Day this Sunday, I thought I ought to get my mother some kind of present. This used to be hard, but now it's easy: I get her diabetic chocolate (because she's diabetic). She gets it for Christmas, birthday, mother's day and occasionally as a surprise. I usually get her 7 or 8 150g bars (one of each kind they do) from a chemist's shop in the Co-op, which lasts her around two days.

No, I'm not kidding: my mother will eat 8 large bars of chocolate in two days. This may be how she got diabetes...

Anyway, recently I noticed that Boots had started selling diabetic chocolate again, so I bought some from them, too. My mother will have four days' worth of chocolate this time. Unlike the Co-op, Boots do regular-sized bars, too. Out of curiosity, I decided to buy one and scoff it myself.

Hmm.

I don't think chocolate will feature strongly in my diet should I get diabetes myself...

Gaydar

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Oh, here's something I haven't mentioned before: for some reason completely unknown to me, I have an excellent gaydar. Basically, I'll see or hear someone and out of nowhere will just know that they're gay. I don't ask to know it, and I don't seek to know it, I just suddenly know it. I have no idea how or why it happens, it just does. I noticed I was developing the ability in my late 20s, by which time I was married; I don't know if that has any bearing on it, but there you go.

When the signal goes off, I'm almost invariably right (at least I have been in cases where the result could be confirmed). That doesn't mean it goes off for every gay person that falls within its range, but it does trigger a lot quicker and a lot more often than it seems to for other people — even for some gay people. It's a bit annoying, actually, because the information is utterly useless to me: imagine what would happen if, every time you saw someone with red hair, suddenly you became aware that they were red-headed — that's how it is. Unless I were specifically wanting to discuss some matter of red-headedness with a redhead, why would I want an alert every time I spotted a redhead? Yet that's what happens with gay people. It's bizarre.

There are some limitations:

It doesn't go off for women anywhere near as often as it does for men. This may be because I encounter fewer homosexual women than homosexual men, or because it doesn't detect them.
It doesn't go off for gay men every time; it didn't go off for Stephen Fry, for example.
Very, very rarely it can go off for men who aren't gay. Well, it's happened once as far as I'm aware: it triggered for a Californian guy whom I knew wasn't gay — in fact he was extraordinarily successful at attracting women. Maybe they thought he was gay, too, and lowered their defences?
Sometimes, it only triggers when I discover from other sources that someone is gay. For example, although I sensed that Derren Brown had had some kind of self-identity problem in his past it didn't trigger for him; when I read in the paper that he was gay, suddenly it triggered. Great, tell me something I don't already know...
It doesn't trigger for someone it's already triggered for, assuming I remember them.
If it doesn't trigger, it doesn't warn me when I'm told someone is gay and they're not (which has happened in the past).

I mention this as a personal quirk that I can't help having and have no use for; I guess it could say something deep-rooted about my emotional attitude to homosexuality (which is basically DOES NOT COMPUTE), but actually I don't think this is the case — it's purely an observational thing. Hmm, I'll maybe explain what I mean some time in a post I've been intending to write for some time but have yet to get around to — look out for a future mention of bananas, fonts and Chinese women from behind...

Captain Jack — ping! But why?

Spot the Difference

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

This fell out of the copy of the Daily Mirror that my father-in-law bought today:

Spot the difference between the ear with the hearing aid and the one without, eh? Well it's certainly hard, but if you look closely:

There, you can just about make out a clear plastic tube running up out of the ear on the right. The rest of the image looks pretty much the same, though.

Hmm ... perhaps a little too much the same?

Here are the two images showed fast one after the other. It's a bit jumpy, because I can't be bothered to spend ages lining it up just for you, but you can see what I mean:

Apart from the clear tube and two swatches of hair, everything else is the same. When putting the hearing aid in (or taking it out), no other hair was displaced. Only the hair that might get caught in the picture when cutting the thin tube from one image and pasting it into another moved. If you look closely enough, you can even see a rectangular boundary.

So there you go, you've spotted the difference: the image on the right has been photoshopped and the image on the left hasn't.

Internet Thief

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Oh, my younger daughter heard on the grapevine (ie. theschool bus) why it is we lost the Internet last week.

It was stolen. Some thieves took dug up the copper cable and absconded with it. They had to use a mechanical digger to get to it, too. I guess that the enhanced security that the railways have put in place to stop people from stealing signalling cables has necessitated a change in tactics.

I'd have thought there was more metal in a melted-down JCB than in a melted-down couple of miles of phone cable, though.

Discussion Papers

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

Each week this term in my final-year undergraduate course, EE314, we have a two-hour class discussing a paper that I gave out earlier. So far we've done:

Raph Koster: Laws of Online Game Design
Julian Dibbell: A Rape in Cyberspace
Zachary Booth Simpson: The In-Game Economics of Ultima Online
Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics, chapter 7
UnSub: This SuXXorz; I quit!!11!
E. Powys Mathers and Joseph C. Mardrus: The First Voyage of Sindbad the Sailor
Douglas Galbi: Sense in Communication, section II.

I didn't link to the two books up there, because I had to photocopy the relevant pieces to hand out. UK IP law allows me to do this for legitimate academic purposes, so long as I don't reproduce more than 10% of the content of the book as a whole.

We don't always have a paper (last week we created a plot on-the-fly to match the Hero's Journey), but I try to have something that is either at undergraduate level or that will give them something to talk about. We haven't discussed Galbi's paper yet (it's this week), and I'm not sure how it will go; I suspect the programmers won't be all that fussed by it but the designers might see what it's getting at.

Anyway, because of some clash with "project presentation day" I only have one more paper to give out, which I'll do this week. The lectures are about to cover Law and Virtual Worlds, so I want a nice paper in that area. Unfortunately, all the nicest papers are inordinately long even if you do ignore the 50% that is comprised of footnotes¹. Those that are shorter tend to be single-topic only.

I did find a paper that did the job: CmdrSlack's So You Want to be an Armchair Lawyer, published in Grimwell Online, 2005. Unfortunately, I can't link to it because the web site currently says "Yup, the website is still under construction." and has done for some time. Fortunately, my early decision to keep physical copies of every academic paper I read meant I had a printout of it. It's this I shall be handing out to my students this Thursday.

I'm building up quite a collection of papers now, some of which I personally regard as important or significant but have been off the Internet for over a decade. I wonder what will happen to them once I die?

Actually, I don't. If I die while still working at Essex University, they will be dumped in a small skip and taken for recycling; if I die when retired, my wife will take them for recycling. If I outlive her, well I guess my children might find them a home, but it's not as if anyone is going to read them except maybe someone doing a PhD in history 150 years later.

Oh well, I don't keep them for other people, I keep them for me, so tra la la.

¹The Lastowka and Hunter paper I linked to has exactly 400 footnotes.

Hubba Hubba Hubb

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

From this week's MCV:

Because of a tie-in with Nintendo and its new DSi XL, this week's MCV is larger than normal, meaning that this full-page ad is on a page 28cm x 39cm instead of the usual 23cm x 32cm. It's not just crass — it's super-crass!

Jeez, if they really wanted to use that tagline how hard would it have been to have stood a guy next to her doing something along the same lines?

It's still 1976 in MCVland, then...

Referenced by Hubb Huh?.

Back Online

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

The Internet connected itself to my computer again last night, so I can now answer all those emails I've been getting since it died overnight on Wednesday.

Well, maybe. Yesterday, I checked my email using a web browser from my office at the university. Instead of the usual page, I was presented with a swish new one, with a choice of three server-side programs to access my mail. I tried them out, used one to reply to an email or two, and then logged off.

When I tried to email using MS Outlook this morning, it didn't work. Apparently, my use of the new browser software made some magical, mystical changes on the server that rendered my usual method of downloading emails inert. It took me 40 minutes of reconfiguring and sending myself test emails before I figured out what was wrong (my account name had changed from rbartle to rbartle@mud.co.uk), whereupon it all worked again.

I'm not entirely sure that there still isn't something crazy going on, though, because instead of the usual 1,000+ spam emails I get a day there were only 300 for two days. I suspect there's some back end spam-zapping going on, but I can't see where (there's an option to turn it on, but it's disabled). Because of this, it may be that if you email me and I don't reply, it didn't even reach my PC. If that happens, try my university address; that also has an unwanted spam-zapping thing going on, but the chances are it's a different one...

Underestimation

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

My mother lives alone in a bungalow with only four rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. Because of this, her electricity bill only comes to something like £50 a month.

However, she hasn't had her electric meter read for ages and ages — several years, in fact. People who were supposed to come and read it never did (she got compensation from the electric company for this, twice) so her usage was estimated. She can't read her own meter, because it's in a box to which she doesn't have a key — plus she's completely untechnical so couldn't do it anyway. I opened it with a makeshift key I manufactured myself out of a bent strip of metal and did a couple of customer readings for her, but she has two tariffs (daytime and nighttime) and the meter flashes them up one after the other on a single display; it's not apparent which number is for which tariff (you have to wait a while to see which one changes, which took more time than I had available to do the reading), so I had to give both numbers and tell the electricity company I didn't know which was which. I don't know that they knew, either...

Recently, a meter-reader did appear and did read my mother's meter. The result is that her electricity bill has gone up to over £200. She's in a mad panic about this.

OK, well looking at the figures, it seems that the electricity company was underestimating her electricity consumption. They weren't doing it by much, but over the course of a several years it's accumulated. She's actually used over £500 of electricity more than she has paid for. The electricity company is spreading the repayment over 6 months, which means that her monthly bill is going to go up by close to £100 over those 6 months before it drops back down. They're flexible about this, though: she could pay the £500 off in one go, or spread it over 2 years (so her monthly bill was only £25 higher) if she preferred. I explain all this to her, and she understands, and then the moment I stop she thinks "£200 a month!" and panics again.

OK, so half that £200 or so is to catch up for electricity she's used in the past few years in excess of what she's paid for. It's annoying, especially because it's due to the poor meter-reading record of the electricity company, but once it's paid off it will go. My mother's panic will last only 6 months (yes, she can panic for that long).

What about the other £100, though?

Well, the way the electric company works, this is estimated. They look at how much electricity you used in the previous two quarters and charge you as if you were using the same amount the next quarter. Obviously there will be some discrepencies — you'll be paying more in Summer than you should be because you used more in Spring and Winter when it was colder — but on the whole these balance out (assuming, of course, that you do actually read the meter and not just keep charging people as if it were Spring/Summer, which is what seems to have happened to my mother).

So, the other half of the £200-per-month bill my mother has comes from the electricity company's estimation of her actual usage. They seem to think she'll be using £100 of electricity a month. This is twice as much as my own electricity bill; OK, so our house is gas heated, but it has computers on a lot of the time and more electrical appliances. £100 a month for my mother's house seems excessive. So how did they derive that figure?

Well, it looks as if they did it like this. They examined the two-quarters-ago (estimated) reading from August, examined the latest (accurate) reading from February, figured out how much the difference was and divided by 6 to calculate how much electricity was being used per month. They work in kilowatt hours, and because the price of electricity keeps changing you can't do a direct mapping of electricity usage to pounds, but if you do then you still get the gist of it. Anyway, this approach sounds perfectly rational until you realise that in my mother's case it includes that £500 worth of electricity which hasn't been showing up in the meter readings until now. From the electricity company's point of view, it appears that she used the £300 she paid for plus the £500 she didn't all in 6 months. Divide by 6 and that's roughly what they think she averages per month. Except, actually that £500 was built up over several years of working from unsubstantiated estimates; they should be dividing by 36 or 48 to get the true excess per month — more like £15 than £50. Her underlying usage should be £65, not £100.

As a consequence of this, the next time her meter is properly read the electricity company will discover that she has been overpaying, and will have to reduce her bill to give her the money back. If they then work on an estimate, though, they'll think she's been using less electricity than she has and the next time she'll have to overpay again. I've run the maths and this does eventually converge rather than diverge, but still, it's not exactly satisfactory.

According to my wife, who pays these things in our house, we're currently £400 in credit on our electric bill. Gawd knows how that happened, either...

Unparking

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

The Internet is still disconnected from my house. I wonder how the world is coping with the loss?

Today, I got to the university at around 8:35, and as a result got a decent parking space. My 11am CE314 class, scheduled to end at 12:40, actually ended sooner than that because of the four students present, three said less than the fifth, guest student from the Literature department. As a result, it took less time to create a Hero's Journey plot on the fly than it might have.

Anyway, as a result of this, I got to my car at 1:45 to find the car park full with vehicles driving around looking for people to leave. As I was one such person, naturally I caught their attention. Unfortunately, I caught the attention of more than one of them...

Here's the scene:

I'm the green car. The blue cars are all parked and unoccupied. I'm going to drive out onto the road following the arrow. The three red cars are all going to attempt to get into the space I vacate. The one on the right got there first, and actually asked me if I was leaving, so I'm inclined to try and arrange things so she gets the space. However, she has to reverse into it, whereas the other two red cars can just drive in straight. The one at the top is a people carrier, and looks to have a bunch of screaming kids in the back: etiquette means nothing to him, he's going to go for it. The one at the bottom is figuring out what I'm going to do, and reversing so that if I try block her when I come out, she has room to sneak in anyway.

I don't know what happened when I drove off because, well, I drove off, but I do know the people carrier didn't get my space because I made sure he didn't. I spotted both the other cars making an attempt to get in, but I don't know which made it. Sneaky woman would have won if she was willing to cut it close with the car parked behind, but first woman could have beaten her if she was quick off the mark and confident in her reversing skills.

Much as I enjoy a good drama, the university really does need to make more car parking spaces availaible...

Referenced by Discussion Papers.

Net Gone

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

My Internet connection has gone, along with my phone line. It's not just me, the whole village has phone problems. That's why QBlog won't be updated until the fix the problem, and why I won't be answering many emails...

Referenced by Internet Thief.

Overheard

richard@mud.co.uk (Richard Bartle)

I'm sitting on a train right now, heading back to Colchester. I went to London today for a workshop on the possible uses of games for certain government departments. All was going swimmingly well, until the five minutes where I blacked out and regained self-awareness to find myself saying "I think I may have just ranted".

Anyway, today's post isn't about that at all.

A knot of students approached me in Theobald's Road and asked me to define the word "geezer" for them. They didn't even know if it was a noun or an adjective. Naturally, being chivalrous, I obliged. However, I did consider mentioning to them that there are things like dictionaries and the Internet that might give better results than strangers accosted in the street.

Oh, that isn't what this post is about either. What it is about is a set of four random conversations I overheard today.

The first was in Boots the chemist, where I was picking up a prescription. One of the people being served already was a guy who was having a mobile phone conversation in a very loud and slurring voice. I don't know what his prescription involved, but he had to show some identification and then drink the medication in front of the pharmacist. None of this interrupted his phone call, which it became gradually apparent was to the mother of his son. He was making all kinds of threats to her — throwing acid on her face so she'd never be a mother to a child again was one — all without a care for the possibility that two pharmacists, another customer standing next to him and me could hear what he was saying. After he was gone, the pharmacists assured each other and us that he was on some kind of register, and would not be throwing acid at his former partner. Still, I'll feel rather bad if he does.

The second conversation was at a branch of Café Nerd. I was trying to write some thoughts on a design I have for a Facebook game, but as ever, words (from this conversation) distracted me and I couldn't string together coherent sentences. I started playing Master of Orion instead. Anyway, the conversation concerned a business trip which the two participants had been on. They were two guys, and in order to save money they'd shared a room in some large hotel in America. However, they had charged expenses for two rooms. The lack of a second receipt had been caught by the accountants, so the pair were agreeing on the story they would be telling to explain why the receipt was missing and why one of them should be reimbersed the $2,800 claimed for it. So, it's not just MPs, then.

The third conversation was also in Café Nero, and was a job interview. The woman being interviewed was a mother who wanted to work three days a week only, and was leaving her current three-day-a-week job because they still gave her five days worth of work in it. The man interviewing her was slightly younger than she was, and was coming out with a stream of management platitudes about how this was a company that understood its workforce and their needs and it was all very flexible and there was no pressure and most of their money was made by six people working on a single project that he was in charge of and ... just a moment! It suddenly changed from being an interview to being some kind of boasting event. The man had clearly made up his mind that the woman was actually pretty good value, and so switched to telling her what a great and powerful person he was so that when she started work she'd be his thrall. What a sleaze! I felt like going up to her and telling her what I thought, but it turned out I didn't need to: he went to the toilet, and while he was gone she got up and left.

The fourth conversation was on a tube train. Two guys in their 20s were talking about a trip to the Red Light District they'd made. I don't know which RLD, but they mentioned a restaurant called Teasers where all the waitresses were topless, so that might narrow it down. It would seem they had a lot of fun there, although quite why they felt that it was a suitable topic of conversation for the ears of 20 people in an underground train is a mystery to me. I didn't hear the end of this conversation as it was interruped by a student from Queen Mary Medical College collecting money in a bucket for rag week. Every person in the carriage, including the two men who'd been stuffing notes into a dancer's knickers over the weekend, dropped some change into the bucket. There were no exceptions, which is quite amazing when you think about it. OK, well yes, there was one exception: me. I didn't like some of the charities that the student said the money was going to, so I kept my hands in my pockets. Peer pressure doesn't work on me, you may have noticed.

I'd better stop now, as two young women have just got on the train and started to chat. I'm finding it impossibly distracting...