Symbolic Forest

Well, good morning. It’s the end of the week, and I’m glad. One more day to get through, though.

Things I haven’t managed to write this week: more Books I Haven’t Read; a Book I’ve Finally Finished Reading; any Photos Of The Week. I was even tempted, at one point, to do the first Symbolic Forest Restaurant Review,^* but, er, didn’t.

Also-ran news stories of the week: another stupid driver, whose excuse for speeding was that there was little risk of hitting a goat at the time. Unluckily, his bleatings^** were ignored by the police. Not quite as stupid, though, as the man from Thorne who decided to destroy a speed camera with Thermite, but drove his van right past the camera as he did so. Oops.

A few days ago, I was chatting to Taloollah on the phone, and she said she’d read my review of the little local gig we went to last week. Apparently, it read as if I didn’t enjoy myself, feeling much older than the rest of the crowd, and not really liking the music. Which is a bit unfair of me to put across, because I did have a good night out. I’m probably much grumpier in style, writing here, than I am in real life; it’s just that I find writing cynically to be easier, and often more fun too. In real life I can be annoyingly enthusiastic and bouncy about some things – puppyish, even – but I rarely express that here, because I find that sort of mood a lot harder to describe effectively. I take the easy option, and write like a curmudgeon instead.

Oh, well, I’m going to try to be cheerful today anyway. Time to get myself to the office and get some work done, and then time to switch off, forget about the office, and relax. See you next week.

* of a rather nice Indian on Haxby Road. It needed a bigger indoor pond.

** The Plain People Of The Internet: Groan!

Keyword noise: bad driving, books, Craig Moore, driving, food, grumpy, literature, reading, restaurant, Thermite, Yorkshire.

Owning up to your mistakes is almost always the best thing to do. In an hour or so, it looks like I’m going to be proved wrong about something.

Specifically, something I wrote almost a year ago,^* when I said: “at the earliest, [Tony Blair is] going to resign in the first quarter of 2009″. It looks, now, that I’m going to be nearly two years out, and that he’s going to give up power before getting within a year of Thatcher’s longevity record. On the other hand, I’m not the only person who was wrong. According to the article that prompted the earlier post, this time last year most Labour MPs weren’t expecting him to go until 2008. I still don’t believe he would give up power willingly until 2009, if he thought he could get away with it. I think that saying “yes, I’m going to resign, but not yet” is a bloody stupid way to run any sort of organisation, to be frank. Moreover, I’m wondering just how many journalists who have previously said “Blair will resign in 2008″, or similar things, will admit that they were wrong about it.

There’ll be plenty more chances for my predictions to come true in the future, of course. In January this year I said that George W Bush will still be alive in 2009, despite the “Nostradamus-inspired” prediction of author Mario Reading. I’m betting that my own prediction there is rather more secure than Reading’s – or than my earlier prediction about Blair. We’ll just have to wait and see.

* fifty-one weeks ago yesterday, in fact.

Keyword noise: George W Bush, government, Mario Reading, mistakes, Nostradamus, prediction, Prime Minister, resignation, Tony Blair.

One year ago today, I wrote:

This post is the first post. The first real post on SymbolicForest.com

Yes, this site has been going now for a whole year. I haven’t quite managed the original target – a proper post every day – but the amount I have produced isn’t bad going.

From before day one, this site has promised “restlessness, whinging, perversity, opinion, and bad jokes.” I like to think that, over the year, it’s been borne out. I’m definitely still restless, still whinging regularly, and always tell bad jokes. My life, though, has changed a lot over the past year; I’m not sure how much of that has been reflected in my writing, but it has. I’ve found a new social scene, and made new friends. In fact, I’m writing this sitting in the living room of two friends I didn’t even know a year ago. I’m a lot more comfortable with who I am, even though I’m still finding new things out about myself all the time. I’ve been on an emotional rollercoaster, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I don’t know how my life is going to change in the next year. I know how I’d like it to go, but I have no way of knowing if it will. Change is going to keep happening, though, and I’m going to try and keep writing about it.

Keyword noise: anniversary, blogging.

Lounging around on a sunny Sunday morning, I was planning, plotting, and thinking of things to write here. Planning on writing about the cake K was promising to bake, or W’s upcoming birthday, or yesterday’s trip to Oxford with C and P and various other people. And I started thinking: why do I refer to people by letter like that?

I quickly realised where I might have got it from: the scientist and writer Jeremy Bernstein. I have, somewhere on my shelves, a copy of his book Experiencing Science, a compilation of articles he wrote for the New Yorker. It is mostly a series of pocket biographies of prominent scientists, from Kepler through to Oppenheimer via Lysenko, Franklin, and others; but at the end of the book is a slightly strange, partly fictional essay on the work of Turing and Gödel. In which all the main characters – the fictional ones, at any rate – are referred to by their initial letters. K, W, and so on.

I can’t say I fully understand Gödel’s theorems. My maths isn’t that good. I do love its implications, though. It underwrites and undermines the whole of computer theory; and, as someone who works in IT, I know from experience that computer theory hardly ever matters in real life. Someone once asked me, politely, to shut up, on a train, because I was trying to explain Gödel’s theory rather loudly to Δ and I hadn’t realised we were in the Quiet Coach. I try to reread Bernstein’s book every year or two, and not just for the Gödel chapter; clearly, though, it’s been a bigger influence on my own writing than I’d realised before.

Keyword noise: biography, books, Experiencing Science, Gödel's Theorem, influences, Jeremy Bernstein, journalism, Kurt Gödel, maths, pen portrait, pocket biography.

You can see, now, why I wanted to end the London post series early – I didn’t want yesterday’s post to merge into it. Yesterday’s post was prepared some time ago, and the last of the London series was written nearly a week early too – see, there is planning involved in some of this.

Not many people at work observed the two minutes silence yesterday, as far as I could tell. I found a quiet part of the building, where I wasn’t on the security cameras and wasn’t likely to be interrupted, so I could spend a few minutes with my own thoughts. From what other people have said, it seems that most of the people I know who were personally affected did something similar – rather than join in some sort of group silence, they found somewhere quiet to sit and think on their own.^*

It’s been a bit stressful at work, coming back from a week away and trying to catch up on everything. “That’s nothing,” said Big Dave, “I was working 12-hour days while you were off. And I’ve been told I can’t take any holidays until the end of the month.” Fortunately noone has said anything like that to me since I returned.

Scanning got so boring that I’ve given in and bought an expensive digital camera. I’ve signed up for a Flickr account too, to try to avoid running out of disk space on this site; when there’s more on it than just daft test-shots of myself in the mirror, I’ll link to it.

(and with that, I’m going off out for the weekend. See you next week)

* and eat cake, which is the best way to remember someone who loved baking.

Keyword noise: Big Dave, camera, July 7th, London, photography, remembrance, terrorism.

When I write things here, I don’t think about who might be reading them. Most of the time, I write posts to entertain an itch in my head. I get it down in words, and then I forget about it. The readers, if I do think about them, are the crowd of maybe 20 people who I know personally, who I know read this site fairly regularly.^*

It’s a bit of a surprise to realise that other people do read and follow what I write. The other day, for example. I was sitting around in a club, one of those places where there are lots of people whose faces look somewhat familiar, but you don’t actually know them. One of those people – I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before, but it would take me a few minutes to remember where – joined in the conversation. Before long, he said, to me: “I remember you blogged about that.”

All I could do was nod, in a slightly surprised way. But, really, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. These words are out in public, after all. There are a couple of sites on the net that have both a photo of me^** and a link to this blog; and nearly all the customers of the club we were in have an account on one of them. Nevertheless, I was rather surprised, because I’d never have dreamed that some random stranger who I’d barely talked to before would have seen my photo online, read the blog, and remembered it well enough to then recognise me in a dark nightclub.

This is all extra-silly, though, because I do the same thing myself. So I shouldn’t be surprised when it happens to me. In fact, that same night, I had a conversation with someone else I barely know, where I was the one saying “oh, I read that on your blog.” That story, though, can wait for another day.

* either because they have linked to me, or because they know me in real life, or because I know they follow the links to this site from other places I’m active online.

** although I am very used to people saying “ooh, you don’t look like your photo at all!” There is even a photo I’m in somewhere on this site, but it’s not captioned.

Keyword noise: audience, blogging, readership.

The great thing about a three-day weekend is that it means you can fit two days’ social events into the weekend, and still have a day over to relax and recover before getting back into the office. And, of course, to try and make sure you have plenty of blog posts in draft ready for the following week.

In the meantime, it’s been a while since we’ve had Search Request Round-Up. So, here are some of the better ones:

did nostradamus predict bird flu – no.
have you tried turning it off and on again – ohhh, yes. Many, many times.
takin over the asylum dvd – I have no idea if it’s been released or not, but it definitely should be, and I’d buy it if I found a copy.
not to be loose or hump shunted is a phrase you see painted on the sides of railway wagons. In essence, it means “careful – don’t bash it about”.
rachel whiteread cubes what will happen to the – I’d assume they’ll all be melted down, because they do look recyclable. Unless, of course, anyone has a spare derelict power station to re-erect it in.
has suzie dent got a boyfriend? – I really have no idea. Try asking Des Lynam.
how do you make chocolate cornflake cake? – I can’t remember the details, but essentially you just mix cornflakes and melted chocolate, and try to resist eating the mixture before it sets.
pasquale’s italian edinburgh – I don’t think we ever did work out if Pasquale’s chippy on Clerk St – the one all the students bought their deep-fried confectionary from in my day – is still there or not.
photograph of drunk people on glasgow underground – I know I, for one, have been drunk on the Glasgow Subway, so they can’t be in that short supply
local paper cleckheaton – I assume it’s covered by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, though.

And that’s enough of that for a bit.

Keyword noise: internet, search requests.

It’s that Friday post again…

It’s also getting into the hayfever season. I’m already getting complaints about the volume of my sneezes. This morning, though, whilst getting dressed I sneezed. And fell over. With one sneeze, my back became a little world of pain. I could barely move, and had to lie on the floor whimpering for ten minutes in the hope it would go away. It still hurts quite a lot as I’m sat writing this.

Things I’ve been thinking about a lot this week: the rubbish choice we have in the local elections, Flann O’Brien, and the Plain People Of The Internet. Expect them to pop up here again soon.

Following up Tuesday’s post: our ventilation fight with the Office Manager goes on. His latest claim is that it would be illegal for us to prop the door open, under the fire regulations. In retaliation, I now have a digital thermometer on my desk. At least The Boss is starting to weigh in on our side, having realised just how warm our office gets. Currently we’re at 22.3 Celsius and rising.

There was a bit of a spike in blog traffic the other day; it turns out I was spidered by a mysterious site which consists solely of an “under construction” page. How 1990s of them. I suppose it’s my own fault for not setting up robots.txt properly.

Current temperature: 23.8 Celsius and rising. Sorry, 23.9.^* I’m off to get a glass of water.

*** or 75.2 if you’re American. Although it went up to 76.3 in the time it took me to write this footnote.

Keyword noise: air conditioning, allergy, backache, hayfever, sneezing, temperature, ventilation.

The other day, I wrote a post that essentially said: “today was a Thursday, but it felt like a Friday“. The next day – when it was still the top post on the page – Gordon replied: “hang on, it is Friday!”

I know it’s hardly a serious thing, but it set me thinking: should I try to stick to a more rigid posting schedule? After all, it’s convenient for the readers if I’m nice and predictable: posts coming up at the same time every day, not just maybe one a day, at some point. The Plain People Of The Internet,^* the theory goes, are used to, say, predictable telly scheduling,^** and would like predictable blog scheduling too.^***

As it is, the blog is updated when I can think of something. Usually, this means late at night, which (in turn) means that, say, a Thursday entry doesn’t get read until Friday. Sometimes, though, it means lunchtime. Occasionally, I post something early in the morning: this means I have been Organised, and drafted something properly. Most of the time – like now – I write whatever’s on top of my head, and press post straight away. Should I be a bit more organised about it?

* apologies to the late Myles na gCopaleen, whose column in the Irish Times was often visited by the argumentative Plain People Of Ireland.

** Presumably apart from the ones who watch BBC 2.

*** I think I originally read this in something by Nielsen, but I can’t find the quote right now.

Keyword noise: blogging, Jakob Nielsen, regularity, timing.

Gordon has written something very interesting about why he likes reading blogs.

…now and again I’m still taken aback when I read something on a blog that I hadn’t previously considered. … I mean when someone, as part of a post, mentions something specific about themselves that I hadn’t previously noted.

You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s good. Essentially,^* he loves the occasional sudden reminders that you don’t know much about even your regular reads. There are fundamental parts of their personalities that don’t get mentioned.

Personally, when I started this blog, I particularly wanted to hide certain things. Well, “hide” is the wrong word – “omit” would be better. So, there are lots of things about myself that I don’t talk about, largely because they would be really quite boring to most people. Some of the things on the original list, though, have probably seeped through by now. It makes me wonder, though: those of you who read this site even though you don’t know me personally, or from one of the messageboard sites I post on. Do you care that you don’t know very much about me?^**

* and, Gordon, if you’re reading this, I hope I’m not misrepresenting you by my overly-trimmed summary

** For one thing, your mental picture of me is probably better-looking than reality.

Keyword noise: anonymity, blogging, imagination, personality.