Full of cold, just like the rest of my family has been over the past few days. And this sense of dislocation has not been helped by two seperate building jobs (bathroom strip, plaster and retile... patio regrout) going on at once over the weekend. And the wife's needy 30-year-old brother dragging everyone down. And a stupid-hard day at work today.

But. Now it's all quiet. I can hear the local campanologists practicing in the distance, the washing machine whirring in the kitchen, a car passing quietly. And that's it. Bliss : -)

George Osborne played a blinder today then. Really inspired me that he'd be a good bet to be in charge of the economy.

• Real terms pay cut for public sector employees on £18k? Hardly fat cats really, on £8k below the national average wage)
• That pension age thing that kept changing throughout the day? (and it still won't work)
• 3bn a year saved by cutting bureaucracy? (after the shining success that was the Gershon Review which cost more than it saved - which bureaucracy do they want to cut, where, and how much will it save?)
• Abolish child trust funds? (where will the money parents have already have saved go?)

Now it's easy (and pleasing) to have a go at Tories for their short-sightedness, devotion to the interest of business, and complete lack of understanding of the wider implications of their actions. But the same could be said for the current lot (homes for single mothers - what the shuddering fuck??). So for this long, tedious election build up I'm just going to stick to policy critiques. And as things stand, Labour are just, and only just, looking more convincing on the economy and social justice.

And the recession is another one that has every chance of biting the Tories on the bum. All along they've been saying that the recession is not a global issue, it's all the fault of Labour in the UK. Now pretty much everyone is in agreement that the recession is over, it's likely that official figures will confirm a return to growth this month.

So do the Conservatives say that the recession actually was a global issue, and that global action (spearheaded by a certain G. Brown) has brought it to an end.

Or do they maintain that it was Labours fault, and - oooh! look -  they've solved it. Well done Gordon!

The answer is of course neither. They will try to distract us by banging on about the deficit (which is better than projected) and how it needs to be reduced immediately (which it doesn't, it needs to be reduced when the banks can pay back the loans we gave them.

Not to support Labour in any way, but the Conservatives have a steep uphill struggle to convince anyone they are electable.

Quick recap of the chilli recipe for malcygoff.

Get a big pan - add a tin of chopped tomatoes, a (drained) tin of kidney beans (or mixed bean salad if you can find it without dressing), an empty tin full of water, a generous handful of veggie mince, and whatever vegetables you have lying around - chopped roughly (I like onions, mushrooms, red pepper, runner beans). Season with paprika (the smoky stuff), garlic, chillies (at least a pinch of powder, ideally a chopped whole pepper), salt, pepper, and ketchup. Yes, ketchup - it sweetens the mixture nicely.

Heat and then simmer till the mixture starts thickening.

Serve with tacos (or flour tortilla), grated cheese, sour cream and salad.

It's that simple.

As a very belated birthday present, cybermule treated me to a climbing course at the barnstormingly excellent Bristol Climbing Centre, which is a big climbing playground built into a deconsecrated church off the M32.

I have climbed before, but a long time ago and on the Wainstones in North Yorkshire (which prompted an "ouch, that must have hurt your fingers" from the instructor. It did.) and it's been something that I've always wanted to go back to. I did a "taster session" a while back and that got me interested again, so now it's something that I hope to do regularly.

The first session was today, and focused on the practicalities of climbing safely. Which meant a lot of knots. I did knots back in cubs, but never these.

A figure-of-eight loop, and a double fisherman's knot. And the belaying procedure. Prevoously, I'd just been handed the appropriate ropes and clipped in - relying on my own knots made the whole experience much more scary. I missed, until the end of the session when I was more confident, the more cerebral aspects of climbing. But next week we cover all that stuff and more...

Hopefully I'll be able to keep up a semi-regular climb after I complete the course. I'm enjoying things so far.

Anyway, must get back to practising those knots!

Up at the parents this weekend so apologies for the paucity of posting.

Just had my fingers inside two seperate HP machines. Astounded how badly designed and put together they are. Neither of them would easily incorporate a second hard-drive. Particularly the more,modern one which appears to be completely unexpandable.

Meh.

Been hearing the "Baby Boomer" generation getting a slagging in some pretty wierd places recently... Robert Peston's blog for example. For those uninitiated in the black art of generational stereotyping these are the generation that were born shortly after world war 2, were teenagers in the 60s, full on corporate whores in the 80s and world leaders in the 00s.

They invented many things, pop culture, women's liberation, modern political mass activism and the counter-culture as a discrete entity. But they also invented selling out. And like everything else they did, they did it first, they claim to have done it best and they will sneer at everyone else's efforts as derivative and not as good as the first time.

It never fails to amaze me that the same people - the same actual people, mind you - who blew their mind to Hendrix at Woodstock at the Isle of Wight and Woodstock also voted for and actively supported Reagan and Thatcher. The same people - the same actual people - who disparaged the idea of possessions and lived in communes also developed the idea of property as investment with returns that led us into this whole financial crisis thing that we are currently mired in.

Now that's selling out. What's left for us... marching against the war on terror and then voting BNP to keep the (largely Iraqi and Afghanistani) immigrants out of the UK. Staying up all night on May 1st 1997 and then voting the Tories back in?

In comparison it's pathetic. The Baby Boomers actually looked at one point like they might overthrow the established order and bring about peace and social justice. And then spend 40 years making damn sure no-one else got so close again, closing the universities that fermented this revolutionary spirit to all but their own pampered offspring. And so comprehensively (excuse me) fucking up the global economy and ecosystems that their own grandkids will still be paying it off and making amends.

But coupling this with those jokey "spending the kids inheritance" caravan stickers? Nice.

One of the lovelier aspects of desktop linux are the multiple, beneficial and most importantly free updates, both to the system itself and to the applications.

But if it's lovely on the desktop, it's even more impressive on a mobile. The HTC Magic android phone, which I have been using very happily for the past month or so, will apparently shortly ("October") be updated to version 1.6 of android. Which means search enhancements, camera enhancements, support for enterprise wireless and VPNs and a few other bits and pieces.

More impressive, are the application updates. Android apps (the good ones, at least) tend to be put together by enthusiasts rather than development companies... mainly because unlike the older competitors (*sniff*) Google or HTC do not vet applications before they hit the market. One very good thing about this is that updates (and I mean major updates, adding much new functionality, happen pretty regularly.

Not bad.

I'm really quite startled that I suddenly seem to be a "wedding musician" - it's not at all where I thought things would end up. Can be fun though, but there are a lot of variables that can make it cross the line between fun and sucky. The first is the Wedding DJ.

Now a normal DJ is someone who plays a load of records that fit nicely together and make you want to dance. He may even mix them together to produce a seamless whole of musical perfection.

A wedding DJ is usually not this kind of DJ. In fact, the DJ on Friday evening was so awful that I feel the urge to list his bad points as a warning to those both planning a wedding and contemplating providing music for one.

1. One hundred and twenty dB (SPL) is not a good volume to play music at. Your speakers can't take it, so they distort and sound rubbish. The guests don't like it so they dance at the far end of the dance floor, just where the band are trying to dismantle their PA. And the band don't like it, because unlike the wedding DJ their work relies on their ability to hear.

2. The band are not a record. The DJ does not talk over the band, or try to cut them off mid song. The band know a good deal about working a crowd, and don't need your voice booming from the other end, asking for a "big hand" for their efforts.

3. You are not required to be a personality. Ideally, your voice will not be heard at all during the evening. We expect that there will be "loads of great music to come later tonight", this is what you are being paid to provide. (though our definitions of "great" may differ). And give a microphone to somebody that people actually like to announce the first dance or what have you. Someone who was invited to the wedding, not someone who came free with the venue.

4. You play tunes by pressing a button on your lap top. It even works the lights. Don't come and try to "share" with the band about how your art is not appreciated. You play "Saturday Night Fever" for the brides drunk sister. You play the fucking "Elvis megamix". That is not art.

5. And no, the band don't want your card. Neither do the guests. You come free with the venue. By all means have some cards with you in case you get asked to do that Ibiza residency by the Groom's elderly aunt. But keep them out of sight for godssake.

Next time - the "event manager".

Spent all night playing freeciv with h. mmmm... multiplayer civ :-)

"Hey everyone - I've just changed the way I eat and I feel loads better for it. Basically I used to always eat loads of carbohydrates in the evening, and then have really bad sleep. But I moved my carbohydrate-loading to the middle of the day, and now I sleep really well. The reason for this is that carbohydrates are one of the slowest food groups to be digested because they are such complex chemicals that are difficult to release energy from, and I wasn't able to sleep because my gut and intestines were so active. Now I have just a light meal and I am not actively digesting when I try to sleep. It's great - try it."

Except it's complete bollocks. So don't bother (even though it might still work for me).

Here's why.

First problem - I'm generalising. I'm turning a possible trend in my eating habits into "what I always used to do". Chances are, some days I ate loads of carbs in the evening, sometimes I didn't. And I don't infer (because I don't know) whether those days coincided with my days of "really bad sleep". I'll leave you to spot the other examples in that para, there are many. And repeated testing... or peer review... would help here.

Second problem - statistical weakness.. How long have I been trying this pattern of nutrition? I don't say, but I imply that it's not been long. Maybe if I'd tried for a week and had slept fine all week I would say that. But that's still just a correlation. It doesn't imply causation. Also "sleep really well"? What does that mean - is it quantifiable? Can I measure how much better my sleep is?

Third problem - the science bit. Of course, it's rubbish - it's actually the other way round, Carbs are metabolised probably more quickly than any other food group, they require less water and less energy to break down than anything else and they are the body's preferred source of energy for precisely this reason. But you have to admit - it did sound plausible. Just like the bit about my active gut keeping me awake. Even the common experience of feeling drowsy after a heavy meal should tell you that the opposite is the case.

I could just have easily used an example where the science (on the surface) made sense, but it would still only be implying a mechanism for an externally verifiable effect. And, once again, correlation not causation.

Fourth problem - it worked for me. This doesn't initially seem like a problem, but it is a huge one. Inferring that if it works for me then it would work for you is nonsensical, unless we have completely compatible bodies (and in which case lets forget all this diet nonsense, head upstairs and make sweet, sweet love all night long). We need a larger sample size, with more people able to point to a measurable difference. And why did it work for me - is it just that it's made me more likely to eat a balanced diet? Are there other changes I have made to my lifestyle recently that could have affected my sleep. Or have I just convinced myself that it works, so I'm getting a mild placebo effect?

---

All of these are common errors in "miracle cures" and "amazing new diets". I see them all over the place and it annoys me. Now it annoys you too :-)

Gosh, this is the first LJ post for ever that I've typed on an actual real computer.

I'm at ALT-C 2009, a big ol' conferency bunfight for the educational technology world, currently hiding in my hotel room from the threat of the conference formal dinner.

Anyway, inspired by a session yesterday, I'm wondering whether the 90s is just too recent for retro-futurism. This particular session was kicked off by lavish descriptions and images of technology from the 90s. Dial-up modems. Early mass-market mobile phones, Sega Dreamcast, DOOM, Freeserve, Alta Vista, Gopher... you know the stuff. Anyway the gist of the session was that we had so many dreams of how amazing technology (and particularly technology in education) was going to be - and looking back it looks like we sold these dreams to the highest bidder. To the big boys: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the major edutech vendors like BlackBoard (officially the most evil software company on the planet)¹.

Now this is the same accusation we level at our parents generation - the summer of love people, who lived through a time of potentially great social change and the opportunity for real freedom and then pissed it all away, ending up as the "entrepreneurs" and captains of industry who bolstered Thatcher in the 80s (and chaired banks in the late '00s crash). So much hope, so much possibility and it all descended in to corporate greed.

Have we done the same with online culture - traded the genuinely astonishing and not-actually-illegal-at-all-at-the-time Napster for slick and costly iTunes? I heard someone today argue that Open Educational Resources (my big interest, as I think I've mentioned on here before) was to academic textbooks what Napster was for the music industry... an interesting and telling metaphor.

We are still shocked by the genuinely challenging stuff that comes along, the fact that Wikipedia works (and continues to work) reasonably well, the fact that Twitter is so obviously unprofitable (and that neither of these services have subscriptions or paid ads.)²

But these days the internet is just another marketplace, and looking at this from 1995 that truly sucks and we should be ashamed of ourselves.

---

¹ Excepting, of course, Real.
² And no, not Linux either. Not multimillionaire Mark Shuttleworth's added corporate support package fee Ubuntu (and are those fees going to the guys that wrote the kernel, or CUPS, or Netmanager?). Not RedHat or Novell for pretty much the same reason.

Accidentally got to the big shopping mall an hour early. But the place was open (just the shops were shut). And there were people there. People waiting.

People happy to wait an hour in a deserted shopping mall on a Sunday morning, just to be the first ones into the shop.

H started to hum the tune from 28 days later. And we ran away.

My gut has been rotten over the last 24h and I have no idea why. I get that regularly enough for it to be unlikely to be a series of bugs, but it has been going on long enough, and in enough places, for it to clearly not be environmental.

It's too rare to be a common food allergy (dairy/wheat etc) and it doesn't seem to be linked to anything unusual that I've been eating. There's a slight link to stress, but that would surely aggravate any of the above.

Basically, it's stumped me. It's been going on for years and I'm exasperated with it.

Meh.

The new tarantino was joyously inappropriate and thus very enjoyable indeed. I'd heard all kinds of horrible rumours that he'd actually made a stab at a new genre, but no. Still the slightly airless feel of a film made entirely of pieces of other films and without reference to the outside world. But that maniacal sense of bricolage is itself kind of uplifting.

Thai food then. I love doing Thai influenced stir-fry, and for some reason everyone thinks there is some black art to it. There's not, it's dead easy.

You can put in pretty much any meat or veg you want, though I like to use courgettes, aubergine, mushroom, pepper and onion. You're cooking for crispness so add reasonable size chunks to hot shallow oil in a pan.

The flavourings are the key. And though access to an Asian food store is useful, in real life you can do it from a small supermarket. So if some of these sound random, don't worry.

Add a dash of:-

Sweet soy sauce. The sweeter the better. The proper stuff is basically treacle. Sharwood's "Dark Soy Sauce" needs extra sugar.

Ginger. Fresh is best, but powder is fine. Ginger wine is also good.

Lime juice. Even Lime cordial works.

Chilli. To your taste.

Stout or Porter. Any dark, sweetish beer, if you have it. Not Guinness - not sweet enough.

Toasted sesame oil, any nutty oil really. (Put this in last of all, as the pan cools).

If you keep tasting as you cook, you'll easily be able to balance the flavours. It should be both bitter and sweet.

Sometimes you are so proud of your child.

For instance, when he looks up smiling from his book to Grandma, and with beautiful innocent blue eyes glowing he points at a picture of Christopher Robin and says "That's David Bowie!"

That'll do, kid.

Yesterday we cleaned EVERYTHING.

Bill Bailey was great! Teh mule had somehow nabbed tickets on the second row from the front, which was awesome.

Always a pleasure to hear "bleed on your panini", and I also enjoyed a timely knock at Johnny Rotten's butter adverts ("punk is toast"). Oh and "hallelujah/last christmas" in the style of kraftwerk.

Finally getting round to watching Merlin (thank you dvd post pixies at Lovefilm) and it is inbetween annoying and good.

Annoying for Anthony "Giles" Head and his over-the-top "magic is evil always and in every case" plot advancement device. We're only on ep5 and it's getting irritatingly repetitious. Ditto Arthur with his continued "but father, you're being a bit harsh so I'll disobey you a bit and then get told off" stuff. All the other characters seem to change motivation based on the demands of the episode.

But at least he's stopped talking to that useless dragon thing.

The Guardian reckon the recession is over. And have been met with the howls of derision you would expect.

However, a recession is something very specific - it is two consecutive financial quarters of negative GDP growth, as measured using official government figures. We've been consistently seeing negative GDP growth since 2008. And since the next set of quarterly GDP figures are available from September, we can't know whether the recession has "ended" until then. It's certainly good news that the City are more confident, but this is not a formal definition.

I'd guess that - technically - the recession will have ended this quarter. Several "unofficial" GDP figures have seen a return to growth. However, the hardships caused to millions of ordinary people will not, and these will continue for several years. This is largely because of a lack of confidence during the recession - people spent less, which meant less services and manufacturing capacity needed, which meant less jobs, so people spent less... and so on. And the coming round of public service cuts will not help this either.