Tue, 19 Jan 2010

Martial Arts for the knowless man
With a view to improving my fitness with something also useful, on a whim I went to a Martial Arts "Birds of a Feather" session at LCA yesterday evening. Cool things were seeing the different types of martial arts, from Aikido to Shaolin Gung Fu (Pia Waugh on animal styles, unlit poi balls and quarterstaff) and having a friend, dealing with a knee injury and Leukaemia, show that he can still easily demonstrate some pretty effective combat styles. Slightly painful but still fun things were having the various holds tried on me, including a surprising number of ways you can make someone's wrist really hurt (fortunately, for a short period of time). Slightly less fun but fortunately not painful was the Capoeira guys, who had a bit too much ego for their own good I felt. Capoeira is a rather curious combination of martial arts, dance moves and gymnastics, but I don't think I'll be trying it any time soon.

We started with a bit of a warm-up, and then the experienced people in the group demonstrated some of the different styles. I don't remember much of the exact details, so the highlights were:

• Aikido is purely defensive - in standard Aikido there are no tournaments. In some sub-disciplines, the competitions have two combatants starting with an agreed hold and seeing how they resolved.
• Shaolin Gung Fu seems to have the most number of cool props, but that might just have been Pia's collecting habit kicking in.
• Most people there learnt something from everyone else, and in particular watching Ian's expression of 'wow, that's so cool' as he worked out how painful each hold was going to be just - before it was actually applied to his arm.
• Capoeira includes a lot of different elements and is based on lots of motion.
• Most of the people in the core group were either teaching the style of martial arts they learnt, or just about to. Every one of the teachers agreed that teaching was just really great and they were still learning cool stuff from their students.
• We all had different observations about what martial arts was about - words like 'self-discipline', 'self-control', 'harmony' and 'balance' were used - but they all seem to be about the same ur-concept.

posted at: 12:17 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 22 Dec 2009

Power from the people
I read the article at http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2778257.htm with a kind of despairing interest - because what it says is absolutely right, and it makes me feel very sad about the democracy we supposedly live in.

A precis of the story is: the "Mandatory Filtering" the Federal Government is proposing to introduce will not be stopped by writing letters to your Member of Parliament or to Senator Conroy, signing a petition or blacking out your home page or avatar. It will be pushed through, because the ALP is (supposedly) indebted to the Australian Christian Lobby (the ACL) and because they wield enormous lobbying power at the highest levels of government. We need to change our tactics of getting through to our politicians, Josh says, or fail to stop the filtering being enacted.

The problem here, I would argue, is not that those opposed to the mandatory filter (like myself) are mumbling to themselves. We are doing all the traditional things that people do when trying to get their members of parliament to listen to their opinions: writing letters to politicians, talking to our friends and organising media coverage. These have worked for most issues in the past. Trying to organise avatar blackouts and internet recognition is a way of socially protesting in modern times, and it isn't really intended to reach the politicians.

The problem I see here is that politicians such as Senator Conroy and the various other ministers I've written to and spoken to are all basically plugging their ears to the voice of their electorate. We get form letters that reiterate their invalid, nonsensical and specious arguments, don't answer a single point we raise, and keep on going in their own direction without listening in the slightest to anything we say. They're listening, instead, to the ACL, who get to whisper in their ears directly and imply that they have all these unseen, unnamed christian voters out there who agree with them. As Josh says, the ALP owes the ACL a few favours - favours that the ACL are more than happy to imply are worth much more than they really are.

And the opponents to mandatory filtering are not without friends in Parliament House. Politicians from Senator Kate Lundy and NSW Minister Penny Sharpe down are trying to also counter the spin and the denialism of Senator Conroy and the ACL. But what are the ordinary people supposed to do? Have a cake sale and raise a couple of hundred thousand dollars to buy a couple of high-profile lobbyists? Start setting fire to cars and blowing up ISPs? Donate some money to the ALP with a little note in the bag? Do as Bernard Keane suggests and create a letter so complicated and confused that bureaucrats actually time to answer it (as if...)?

The problem here is that the public are not being listened to. A majority of Australians don't want mandatory filtering. It's being sold as stopping child pornography but the Minister has said that it could be extended to blocking information on euthanasia, abortion and safe sex - things which the Christian right gets all hot under the collar about but where the information alone is not illegal in Australia. It doesn't stop the real criminals, or even a determined teenager, and the whole illusion of children being randomly exposed to 'unwanted' content is a nebulous decoy.

What are we supposed to do if the politicians who represent us don't listen?

posted at: 18:18 | path: /personal/rants | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 30 Jul 2009

The cost of beliefs
I was recently walking around the Australian National Botanic Gardens with friends when we discovered a sign that had been vandalised. References to geological times had been scratched out in a crude attempt to remove any reference to how long ago various features of the Australian continent were formed. My partner, who frequents the gardens, noted that the Creationists had vandalised the sign. It was certainly hard to refute - nothing else on the sign was touched, and the erasure was limited to those specific words, so there's little evidence for any other objective than obscuring the date ranges of geological periods.

I have a large amount of contempt for the vandal(s) that did this, and those that think that defacing public property is reasonable as long as it supports their own world-view. It costs the gardens about $1000 to replace that sign - that vandal has just asserted that their point of view is worth $1000 or more. And in the grand scheme of things it's hardly proving their point - they leave no other information or evidence to prove any contrary assertion. So really this is just a childish attempt to stop someone else from being heard by shouting louder.

Yet this is not done by a child - the scratching is fairly precise and it's too high for a child to reach. So some adult has thought that it's perfectly valid to deface public property to keep their own little world-view intact. The same adult would presumably be outraged if their church was defaced; so why is their defacement OK?

The thing that really annoys me is that it's not even a scientific debate. There's only one type of person who does this - people who believe that a literal interpretation of their own holy book is absolutely right and no amount of scientific evidence can show differently. They're so prepared to ignore scientific evidence they'll try to remove any sign of it. These people fiddle with scientific procedures to prove their own conclusions - they put their hand on the scale when weighing the evidence. Science and logic has always tried to reason out its arguments based on common ground that we all agree on. This person hasn't even tried to be reasonable.

Why do we keep being reasonable with them?

posted at: 17:43 | path: /personal/rants | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 09 Jul 2009

Paul's top ten songs
Pia's post of her top ten songs has made me think about what ten songs I consider most memorable - things that have really changed my life.

1. Quench - Dreams. The first one is easy - this was the song that turned my ears to trance and techno. I'd been sort of imitating this style of in my head, and irritating my brother by doing it 'beatbox' style, for years; it was like there was techno in there but it hadn't discovered what it was yet. Then I heard Dreams on Triple J and it nailed me to the spot. I listened to this album again recently and it's still a brilliant and powerful fusion of good beats and killer analog synth lines. The "Dreams 2001" remake and the Hybrid remix of Miss Shiva's rework of this classic are great, but the original is still the best.
2. beXta - Rhythm Gun. It was the afternoon before going to my first rave; I was listening to 4ZZZ's "Crucial Cuts" programme and they had an interview with beXta, who was playing that night. This mind-pounding, rip-snorting raver started up and in that moment I knew I was going to have an awesome time at the rave. One little secret I feel I can let go of now: the second time I was at a rave and beXta was playing, there was a sort of mini-stage beside her that a couple of people were dancing on; they didn't seem to be choreographed or dressed up or anything. So when "Rhythm Gun" came on I got up on that stage and danced, raising my hands in the air with the chords. I got off the stage after, feeling embarrassed, but if I hadn't got up there I'd have spent a lifetime regretting it.
3. Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene II. It took me a while to track this down in high school, but then I played it until the tape wore out. I listened to this album recently too and it still amazes me - it's so sonically dense yet it has this great sense of space, and the melody line is just so instantly recognisable. How did he make those -- those -- those amazing rippling, wooshing, stereo-sweeping sounds?
4. Mike Oldfield - Crises. A classic album in its own right, with "Moonlight Shadow" being Oldfield's one mainstream hit, but the twenty minute title piece has some brilliant lead lines and has this dark, story- laden feel. The first and second themes and their reprises - in particular the sequencer + delay line section toward the end which builds and builds and builds... musical genius. It was this album that got me started with Mike Oldfield - the second was Incantations, which is another wonderful album. Crises, however, was the one that my friends recognised and liked too.
5. Yello - The Rhythm Divine. Off the brilliant and inspiring album "One Second", each piece holds up in its own right, from the wonderfully atmospheric "La Habanera" and "Goldrush" to the instrumental story-telling of "Hawaiian Chance" and "Si Senor The Hairy Grill" (wtf?). But "The Rhythm Divine", with Shirley Bassey's liquid vocals, grabs you right in the heart and tugs. The last chorus, when she just continues effortlessly up the scale, gets me every time. This is one of those tracks for me that defines musicality and expression (over, some might argue, my other preferences).
6. Tangerine Dream - Logos. I remember going into the record store in Indooroopilly Shopping Town with some spare money and looking for this band called "Tangerine Dream" that a friend had mentioned I might like, if I liked Jarre and Vangelis and so forth. This was a total risk - I had no idea what I should buy - so I figured a concert album would probably be a good bet. Unlike some of my other purchases before and since, this was an absolute winner - it's classic analogue-era TD: melodic brilliance, moving chord progressions, and a pulsing beat that refuses to be stopped. Like "Oxygene II", compilation albums often cut this short but it must be listened to in full length just for the atmosphere. I also found a good friend of mine had been in the audience at that show - I could only say "Wow!"
7. Art Of Trance - Madagascar. Another chance encounter - in the departure hall in Heathrow Terminal 3, spending the long hours between 5PM (when I finished work at BAA) and 11PM (when my flight departed) I was browsing around looking for something to listen to. I espied the "Platipus Beginners' Guide" and recognised the label as one that published several tracks I had enjoyed in the past. I stuck this in my CD player and never regretted it the whole flight home, particular "Bluebottle" by POB and "Rock Rose" by Star, and in fact the whole second disc is an ambient classic. But it was a particularly significant flight for me for other, personal reasons, and I remember listening to "Madagascar" in the last hour of the flight, as I espied Toowoomba and Redland Bay and the familiar landscape of my home town pivoted under me. The driving pulses of the main theme felt like they were pushing the plane on, and I really wanted to be home...
8. Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer. What's not to like? A driving song, easy to sing along to, and a video clip by Aardman Animations. This track has cheered me up on some dark days, but it's hard to explain exactly how I relate to the lyrics.
9. Kate Bush vs Infusion - Running Up That Road. I rarely frequent record stores, but I occasionally go in just to look around and present the appearance of a DJ. So imagine my surprise when I found a limited-release single by Infusion, remixing one of Kate Bush's more memorable pieces, in the 'miscellaneous' bin. The B side is simply blank and there's no record label details or anything - that's how rare this record is. It's this kind of gem turning up in the mullock heap that makes all those other crappy purchases all worth while.
10. Vangelis and Jon Anderson - I'll Find My Way Home. Another of those pieces that means so much more to me than it really should. Jon Anderson's beautiful, clear voice combined with Vangelis' musical genius and mastery of sound. I tried to explain to my mum once what I thought the story behind the lyrics was and I got too choked up with emotion to speak. I don't really think I can explain it now, either - especially because the most moving bit for me is the bridge, where there are no words at all.

Sat, 17 Jan 2009

Wooden laptop case cover for 'real'
People following my ongoing saga of building a wooden laptop case cover can finally give a half-hearted cheer, as today I have actually made one. It's real, it clips onto my laptop, it looks just the right colour, it has the right texture and feels great, and I finally feel like I've actually completed what I set out to achieve. And it's 100% wood.

Um, yeah, that should be '100% wood glued to a plastic case'.

OK, So it's cheating. But I worked out almost as soon as I'd made the metal pieces that the front edge - which had to bend round in a gradual 90° curve and then produce two very small but significant 'tangs' that hook into grooves in the top of the screen - wasn't actually going to work because making those tangs was beyond my skill. They certainly weren't going to hold if made out of wood. And while the idea of having a wooden cover that was more completely wood (it still had to have those metal bits in it) was attractive, the idea of it actually attaching to my laptop was even more so.

So I bought a new cover (couldn't find one second hand), sanded it lightly, and then prepared my implements. I first needed to bend the front edge of the veneer into roughly the right shape, as it was quite dry and brittle and would snap if I tried to press it onto the plastic it in that state. My plan was to get a bit of water, wet down that edge, and then press it in the mould I'd already made; that would bend it into the right shape with no breaking whatsoever. So I went to get a bucket of water and a sponge, foolishly still carrying the veneer in my hand.

It was whilst walking through the door between the main work area in the woodcraft guild's shed and the tea room (where the buckets and water are kept) that the gods of woodworking demanded appeasement. A light gust of wind, channeled in the doorway, neatly snapped the veneer in three pieces - one still in my hand, the other two fell to the floor. I stood quite still and very slowly let my frustration subside silently - there were children present - before getting the bucket and learning how to mend the veneer.

Step one: apply masking tape to the veneer (this would have gone on the inside face if it had any recognisably different faces). Step two: apply veneer tape to the other side - this is basically like a long strip of stamp material: wet one side and it becomes a glue, smooth it in place, and when it dries it holds the piece together. Step three: carefully remove the masking tape.

Now to bend the edge. Which requires... water. Which will unstick the veneer tape if used too much. Right. After adding just the right amount of water, I gradually eased the top form of the mould over it, and pressed it into the bottom form. Hooray for small miracles, the tape held and the veneer as a whole bent neatly and without snapping (again).

Next step: apply polyurethane glue. This is like your regular Aquadhere® but stronger, space-filling (it foams up), resistant to solvents, and (spotting a theme here) sets faster in the presence of water. In fact, you have to lightly dampen the wooden surface in order to get it to set well. (And if you get any on you, you have to wait for two weeks with the affected appendages blackened from stuck-on dust while it naturally abrades away.) Fun stuff to work with.

Working quickly, I removed the top form, damped the veneer down, applied glue and spread it around before the veneer could bend too much (due to the fibers swelling up on the wet side), and threw on clamps to every available part of the mould. I could see the glue foaming up in the drops of water left on the Contact® of the mould. Then, and only then, could I relax.

Then it was simply leave it for four or five days and then gently try to prise the glue away from the mould - it hadn't stuck to the Contact®, but had happily stuck to every non-covered surface it could find, and it had found plenty. I also had to cut away the excess wood from around the edges of the cover, as I had left these intact - this was another area where my lack of expertise led to some rough edges. The glue had also foamed through the gaps, in the wood and set itself in a nice, undissolvable coating on the front of the piece. The wood had also shrunk as the glue dried, pulling the cover into a neat arc. This was beginning to resemble my other cover, and a disappointingly familiar wave of hopelessness washed over me.

Still, not far to go, and this was only Tuesday before LCA. With a scalpel I carefully scraped the layer of glue off - in some areas it had simply foamed between the outer scratch-proof layer and the wood, so I could get a blade in there and cut it away. Other areas required very precise cutting to get as much of the impervious layer away while still leaving wood. I also discovered that the veneer glue, being impregnated with water, had combined with the polyurethane glue to set into a scalpel-resistant polymer. There was also excess glue sticking on the other side which had to be cut and scraped away. Then I flexed my sanding muscles sanding the remaining surface clean and removing all visible areas of glue.

Finally, the finishing (heh) touch: some Shellawax, a special blend of waxes, oils, solvents and magic. As I had suspected, as the Shellawax soaked in, the wood fibers expanded again and I was left with a near-straight cover again. Two coats of this, some vigorous scrubbing with 0000 steel wool to heat it up and remove the streaks, and there it was, finally finished.

Yes, there are still flaws - the cracks in the piece where I glued the fragments together, the chunks out of the edges, and a number of other little imperfections which it is my privelege as the maker to not have to tell you about. But it's beautifully smooth yet textured to the touch, water resistant, and looks damn good. I'm not sure whether I'll give a lightning talk on it at LCA because I don't know if I can fit that saga into three minutes, but I'm going to take it and not the previous cover to LCA and just use it.

Torvalds' Trousers, but I hope it lasts :-)

posted at: 20:21 | path: /personal/woodworking | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 03 Dec 2008

Going to town on a train
I've always loved rail travel. So here I am on the 5:05 from Canberra, heading to Sydney. A plane and even a bus would be quicker, and there would be some possibility that I could have got a lift with someone going this way as well. So why put up with being constantly rocked around, with other people who swear and play the guitar?

For the fun of it, of course! I've never seen some of the countryside I'm travelling through, out the back of Bungendore and Tarago. I've driven under the railway bridges and followed the line from north of Goulburn to Bundanoon, but never been on the track watching the cars. And it really is quite beautiful in an Australian way - rocky creek canyonettes (canyoninas?) and river banks green with recent rains, the rolling hills that yellowy-browny-green that only Australia seems to call fertile, and sweeps of countryside seen from other vantage points. I'm just going past a whole set of brick - brick! - pylons crossing a river that have no bridge or track on them. What is their story? What is that mysterious high-security spot just south of Bungendore that you see easily from the train but never see from the road? What is that huge shipping container area - devoid of cargo - just near Tarago? So many new things to find out! So much countryside I now appreciate for its own character, its twists and turns and long straights, that car drivers never touch.

It's wonderful. And it doesn't cost that much either!

Footnote: added links to Google maps for the two places I could find - the mysterious high-security area isn't showing up where I expect it to be - it's like the track, road, fences with cleared area around them, dams and buildings all just ... don't exist ...

posted at: 17:07 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 22 Nov 2008

Talking for real
Right. With two weeks to go until OSDC, I feel like I'm actually nearly ready to give my talk. The slides are all written up, and my first practice talk-through took 25 minutes - should fit into the 30 minute slot nicely. I aim to do about a dozen more talk-throughs so I can get my notes up to speed, and so that I don't read from the slides, speak too fast or ramble too much. I've spoken at CLUG before but this is an order of magnitude larger audience and three orders of magnitude more important. I really want this to go well, and I'm determined to do it well.

Damian Conway is my inspiration here - I will not fail him!

posted at: 10:49 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 09 Oct 2008

Look Out Eddie Van Halen
Back in the days when Icehouse was in, Crowded House was big and I was getting deeply hooked into Yello, I had a Roland Juno 6. It was my Dad's, but I played it a fair bit. One of the leaders in the analog synthesis days between full-on knob-for-everything setups like the Moog and the start of MIDI and digital control, it is still legendary for producing huge bass lines and stunning synth leads. Then our house burned down and took the Juno with it, and though I often thought of getting another synthesizer I never did.

Until now. It started with playing the piano at friends and relatives houses; then Kate suggested I could accompany her violin playing. As I got more into LMMS I started realising that having a keyboard to record lines and work out notes and melodies on was going to be very useful. So I did some research and found the Roland Juno G, which sat between the full-on knob tweaking of Nords and Moogs (all digital, now, of course, but still faithfully emulating the analogue sound synthesis process), the 'play the demo song' integrated-speaker cheap synthesizer market, and the 'it has 4096 patches, all pianos' professional keyboard. This may sound like a no man's land, but the market segment is for people who want a range of instruments, the ability to fiddle with how they sound, and don't need heavy 'piano-action' keys. Unfortunately, they don't make the Juno G anymore.

Fortunately, it's successor is the Juno Stage, which is basically version 2 - all the features of the G but without the confusion between it and the Juno D. You get knobs to control attack and release, low and high frequency rolloff, and cutoff and resonance of the filter - which you can twiddle on the fly. It comes with 1024 different patches, a variety of modes including split keyboard (SuperSaw on the left and piano on the right is a favourite) and lots of nice features that I haven't truly discovered yet. So I bought it, brought it home, and started practicing again.

Gradually my fingers are warming up again, playing scales and old tunes I used to know. But what has amazed me is the amount of pure inspiration I'm getting from the sounds. A new patch will make me start writing new melodies out of thin air, and when I find that some presets consist of an arpeggio and drum rhythm on the left hand, new mystical tunes will flow out of my right hand and almost amaze me in the process. That and the joy of working out the chord progressions (the title of this post is a nod to the classic synth line of 'Jump' by Van Halen - I hit the first two chords (C, F in my playing) and then had to figure out the next (B) later by experimentation - I don't know what the actual song used but it's easiest to play on G, C, and F) for songs I remember. Playing the Doctor Who theme or the theme to "Axel F" or "Fletch" (yay Harold Faltermeyer) is always a blast, and it all came right back to me.

So I'm now doing regular practice of my own devising, before I seek out someone to teach me how to play more. I'll report how I go plugging it into the computer (yay USB MIDI interface) in another post.

posted at: 13:18 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 25 Jul 2008

No good title
History has been revised. Thank you.

posted at: 21:22 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 20 May 2008

The conspiracy to keep children quiet
Thanks to Steven Hanley, I read Paul Graham's essay "Lies We Tell Kids". His basic point is that adults often don't tell children the strict truth - either by omission or by fabrication - because some questions are hard ("Is there a God?") or destroy the innocence of childhood ("What is a prostitute?"). To my mind his essay parallels Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett's observations in the "The Science Of Discworld" series that we simplify complex stories by abstracting or leaving out details - "telling lies" by omission.

I'm lucky enough to have four nieces; since Kate and I have decided not to have children we have focussed our "raising the next generation" on these four (although I tend to be catholic, if not necessarily orthodox, in playing with any children). They are all reasonably well-adjusted, normal girls in my opinion and I think that, to varying degrees, their parents have tried to be fairly honest with them. On the Tuesday before the Armstrong family went away for a six week trip around the world, they had their family dog put down because of its extreme ill health and the likelihood that it would die while they were away. This was done by a vet in their back yard with the family and their cousins watching and supporting them through that terrible time, so Paul Graham's section on how we lie to children about death particularly resonated with me. These girls haven't suddenly become morbid, or afraid of death, or casual about it, because of that experience - they're still quite normal even after we've exposed them to something that other parents would go to great efforts to hide.

The girls know me as somewhat eccentric, partly because I play running and card games with them, partly for my collection of evil laughs, and partly because I'll bore their ears off with science and technology if they let me. I send them coded messages and make special hiding places around the house for when we play hide-and-seek. I'll tell them when I don't know something, or when I'm glossing over details in an explanation in order to make it twenty words rather than a hundred. I do think that a fair bit of my behaviour is related to keeping them behaving as children - or rather as young adults - rather than making them conform to one or the other but not both at the same time. To me, spending ten minutes talking to one of the girls when she's in trouble with her parents and explaining that I understand why she did the things she did - even though they were wrong - is far more valuable to her than being left with a sense of injustice that "you just can't win against your parents" and "no-one understands my side of the story".

Paul Graham talks at the end of his article about a sort of 'truth debt' built up by all the elisions, fabrications and contradictions the adults have told around children as they reach adulthood. "There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you," he observes. My way of dealing with this is to start early, be honest about the things you can be, and tell them when you're not being honest about the things you can't be. I hate telling lies, especially when I know that sooner or later I'm going to have to tell the truth later and then explain why I told the lie. Sure, I don't intend to freak kids out by telling them things that shatter their illusions of how the world works too quickly, but neither do I intend to shore up that illusion with even more outlandish fabrications.

I do hope that this little essay doesn't warn too many parents off from allowing me to talk to their children :-)

posted at: 12:26 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 19 Mar 2008

Stupid Quote of the Day
Andrew Donnellan quotes Albert Camus rehashing Pascal's Wager as if it's some kind of useful way to affirm what one believes. The certainty that the god that they believe in is the god that will be actually judging them is ... amusing.

I would counter with the Atheist's Wager: "You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in God. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent God, he may judge you on your merits coupled with your commitments, and not just on whether or not you believed in him." Perhaps a reading of the relevant chapters of Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" might also useful debunking of this warped logic.

And I would also add that any God that requires my belief as a "jealous God" is a pretty poor god by even human standards. If a human required constant devotion and commitment in spite of complete and utter disdain and ignorance of the devotees, we'd call them wishy-washy or vain at best and spiteful or megalomaniac at worst. Why do so many religions then excuse their god of these emotions, coming up with ever more convoluted ineffabilities in order to justify a tyrant? I wish I could find what I thought was a Robert A. Heinlein quote on this, but it wasn't in this otherwise excellent collection.

posted at: 14:00 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 29 Jan 2008

Dancing With A Will
Staring at my beer at 8PM on Monday night, it seemed like a crazy idea. Get eight people (preferably four men and four women) to do some Irish Set Dancing (a traditional social dance form with little connection to Dance Dance Revolution or other computer games) in a pub I barely knew on the first night of Linux Conference Australia? No-one from the group who'd signed up was there, the pub was full of Uni students drinking and socialising in their own groups, and I was this complete unknown who'd lugged a small but heavy guitar amp (generously lent by Andrew Naughton) down there. At least the pub owner had been keen, but it looked like I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

When most of the people in the group that had signed up arrived, it looked even worse; they were keen, but I knew that trying to convince two older guys to dance with eachother (meaning no offence to them) was going to be a hard sell, no matter how keen they were about the dancing idea. Reluctantly but with the boldness of the lunatic I plugged the mike and music player in, stood up and started giving some instructions. My quick 'one two' test of the mike received a few friendly but off-putting heckles from the guys at one table. But Rob and Jen were willing and learning, and with nothing to lose I called out "any of you people willing to get up and learn some dancing?"

John, the owner of Naughton's Hotel, gets the credit for what happened next. He knew the students - they'd been coming down to the pub for a while, it seems - and called out to them, "come on, you lot, get up an dance!" Soon one couple got up, then another, and then a fourth, and in astonishment I was teaching a complete set the basic steps and the first bits of the South Galway Reel Set. I started them on a nice slow hornpipe and they got into it, and I swear I have never seen a group of people who've never seen set dancing or even done much traditional social dancing before do it so well! All eight of them were really great, getting around a house in just the right time and still laughing and carrying on.

They responded enthusiastically to suggestions that we do it again at the regular speed, and I taught the first two figures easily. They had a break and I was afraid of losing them again, but they all came back eventually and we did the last three figures. There were a few flailing feet and the 'stomp the ground' action associated with mocking hillbillies, but they were still all having a great time and the rest of their peers were applauding and cheering on. And they were all dancing really well (given the above caveats) - keeping in time and not going too fast or slow. They grasped the geometry of the set quickly and were still laughing away and having a great time. The set finished with a massive cheer and everyone (including me) sat down tired but happy.

And you could have knocked me over with a feather when one of the other guys that had been watching on came over and said "'scuse me, sir, but would you have the music for the Heel And Toe Polka?" Well, anyone that keen cannot be denied, and for the first time in my entire existence I can honestly say that I was sorry I didn't have the Heel And Toe Polka on my music player. I rustled up something that was a reasonable approximation of it and grabbed a partner and soon five couples were polka-ing up and down in the available space. It was, in a word, awesome.

I'd love to do it again on Friday Night. All I have to do is get some of the women around at LCA - especially the organisers - to find some partners and I'm pretty sure we can get another set done. I'll check with the organisers though to make sure that this is both a sanctioned activity and isn't going to get too much in the way. But after that experience on Monday night I am more convinced than ever that Irish Set Dancing needs to move beyond the older people that currently do it and be shared with the young and enthusiastic. How can anyone not enjoy teaching such a excited, able group of people?

posted at: 06:51 | path: /personal/setdance | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 28 Jan 2008

What A Week
I'm now sitting in the common room at St. Mary's college, having registered at LCA and bumbled my way around getting a room and accidentally leaving my schwag bag at the pub. Since we're still waiting to have the wireless networking connected, I now actually have time to reflect on the last week.

I've been staying with friends of mine in Brunswick, and it's been really great to spend some time with them after a long time of talking via email. Playing a game of Go with Mark was a long-held desire and, though I still got badly beaten, I managed to take a couple of stones off him and gain territory where early on he had a definite lead. So while I'm certainly no master I think I'm ready for the Go BOF at LCA.

I did my Red Hat Certified Engineer training during the week, finishing with the exam on the Friday. Unfortunately, I found out on Saturday that I had failed that exam - still achieving my Red Hat Certified Technician qualification but it seems like last place now. It has only increased my appreciation of just how capable and expert the people that have those four letters after their name. Now I have to figure out what I did wrong, a task made more difficult by the fact that they aren't going to actually tell me.

I sort of finished my wooden laptop case cover and am aiming to give a lightning talk about it at the end of the conference. Given that it only barely fits on the back of the case it's hardly a good example of what I'm aiming for, but with a coat of polyurethane sealer on it it does look nice, if I do say so myself. Hopefully it will amuse people somewhat to have a project where they can actually hand around a sample.

Now here at the Fedora Miniconf waiting for Steve to get the wireless network going.

posted at: 09:00 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 21 Jan 2008

Broken by design?
One of my less desirable habits is to leave things to the last minute. The more critical the result, or the more complex the procedure, the more I seem to prevaricate. The psychological reasoning seems to be that if I fail afterward I can always say, "well, I didn't really put any effort into it," as an explanation of why it failed. This leads to a reputation of failure and minimal effort I am keen to avoid.

This is why, with two weeks to get ready after I came back from visiting my family in Brisbane for a two-week sojourn in Melbourne doing a Red Hat training course and attending LCA, that I left my packing until 10PM the night before I was due to leave first thing in the morning. Thus I left my USB sound output, vital to the mixing I want to do at LCA, behind in my frenetic and near-random scooting around the house collecting ephemera.

This is also why, during the same period, with the promise I made to have a finished, good-looking version of my wooden laptop case cover for LCA 2008, I left the actual glueing up until two days before I was due to leave.

I had learnt a few things from the previous test run:

• I had carefully checked the size of the mould so that it would exactly take my Dell-supplied plastic laptop case cover, and then fastened the parts in position.
• I had coated all surfaces with Contact (a plastic book cover material) so that glue wouldn't stick to the mould.
• I had wet the outer veneer and pre-pressed it so that it wouldn't crack when bent around the top end of the mould.
• I knew where to make sure that the glue was completely applied - chiefly around the edges of the pieces so that it wouldn't break apart.

Then the problems started. The first problem was that it was slightly damp, it was the day before I left, and I wanted it to dry out. I left it sitting in the shade outside against a post. When I returned it had bent thirty degrees on that corner. I wet the outer surfaces again and pressed it in a rigged-up frame made of oven grilles and a heavy pot, since I still wanted it to dry out. Even now it retains a set of unusual and possibly uncorrectable bends which make it non-planar when not attached to the laptop.

The second problem is that the front metal piece is slightly further down than it should be - it overlaps the middle ply rather than being beside it. This means that the connection to the laptop top is going to be a bit more of a strain than it should be and is a side-effect of glueing up the whole thing in one go (because the glue isn't tacky when I'm putting it together and therefore the parts in the middle have less friction applied than the parts on the edge). I hope that this will turn out to be a blessing in disguise, but there's no obvious benefit to being one millimeter too short over one millimeter too long so it remains to be seen whether this will actually make the whole thing unusable.

So in my non-copious spare time between now and this Sunday I shall attempt to get some fine sandpaper and some good clear wood sealer and paint it up. If I can find some clever instructions for flattening laminated wood that don't require a week to implement then so much the better. And next time I may consider glueing up the back and middle before adding the front, and using a glue which actually binds to metal. Which may require Kate to be taking photos if the glue can't also be cleaned up with a wet rag (since I spread the glue with my fingers).

But I really wish I had given myself more time.

posted at: 18:28 | path: /personal/woodworking | permanent link to this entry

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