abnib 6.0

Kit and Fiona came down to Aberystwyth to visit the other week for the first time in ages, and – as Paul already wrote – they made the mistake of introducing everybody down here to the phenomenon known as geocaching.

Dan and Paul watch as Kit resets his GPS receiver and Fiona packs up a geocache

For those who’ve not heard about it before, geocaching is often described as “a global game of hide & seek played using GPS technology”. Personally, I prefer Kit’s explanation, which is “using military satellites to find lost Tupperware”. Put simply, participants hide caches (often plastic stay-fresh containers) in interesting places around the globe, and publish the GPS co-ordinates online on websites like Geocaching.com, then other participants try to find them.

Ruth helps Paul up a particularly steep slope

I suppose one could also describe the activity in the context of the pastimes it is most similar to. It could be described as being a little like rambling (although some caches are in urban locations and many are reachable by car), orienteering (but generally with less need to be able to triangulate points and read a map and more ability to use a GPS effectively and understand its limitations), hide & seek (finding things that have been hidden rather than people, of course), and one of any number of hobbies ending with “-spotting” (each geocache has a unique number, and many participants are trying to visit as many as possible, or to visit particular subsets of them).

A small geocache wrapped in grey tape to help camoflage it, the roll of tape, and a TomTom navigation system (being used as a backup GPS receiver).

I suppose another way of describing it might be in the context of the hot cold game, which you probably played as a kid: where while looking for something hidden, the hider calls out “warmer, warmer, colder, warmer again, hot!” as an indication to the seeker as to whether or not they’re on the right track. This analogy is particularly apt when one gets within a few metres of the cache, at which point GPS devices become almost useless at telling you which direction to go in (and of uncertain value at telling you how far away you are – when in a wooded area or surrounded by tall buildings, GPS can be thrown off by tens or even hundreds of metres).

Ruth watches as Kit gets a reading for the cache that Fiona and Paul are preparing to plant

Since Kit and Fiona’s visit, a number of us have jumped right in to geocaching. Paul, Ruth, Jimmy, Claire and I are all now represented on the site: as pacifist_049 (Paul), fleeblewidget (Ruth), JimEsk (Jimmy & Claire), and avapoet (me).

Kit and Ruth prepare to hide one of Paul's first caches

I can’t speak for all of these people, but there’s something about geocaching that’s really grabbed my interest. Since their visit, I’ve been out and found a number of the caches in and around Aberystwyth, and I’ve even hidden the first of my own. At the very least, I’ve been glad of the excuse to make better use of my bike, but more than that: I’ve been pleased to get around and see parts of the town and countryside that I don’t normally visit or look that closely at. Yes, even when I’ve ended up stuck up on a hill in the dark (that’ll teach me to go ‘caching after work in the short days of winter!).

Geocaching way up the Rheidol valley

Perhaps strangest, though, is my (so-far limited) experience of the local geocaching community. After you’ve visited a few sites around here you begin to notice patterns in the names of the people who’ve been there before you, and you start seeing the same aliases appearing again and again. And in a town the size of Aberystwyth, it’s invariably only a matter of time before you make contact with, well, everybody.

Paul, Kit, Fiona and I wandering back from a cache (sorry about the wonkiness of the picture: this one was taken by Ruth, and she's all wobbly and stuff).

At the weekend I was in Morrisons, buying plastic tubs and other supplies with which to make caches – I suppose that in itself might have made me stand out: who goes to Morrisons to buy a stack of small Tupperware boxes and notepads small enough to fit inside them? – when a man come over to me. He looked at me, as if trying to work out where he knew me from, and then looked down at my hands and saw what I was carrying. “Avapoet?” he asked. “Treedoctor2000?” I replied. So there we have it, I’m officially part of the local geocaching community, and I didn’t even mean to.

Ruth finds a cache!

So there we have it, a glowing review for a fun new activity that if you haven’t tried, you ought to. If you own a GPS or even a modern mobile phone or even just a portable SatNav system, you’ve probably got all you need to get started, and with almost a million caches around the globe, there are sure to be a few near you. So if you were waiting for my approval before you went and did so, here it is.

Now get away from the computer and go do something outdoors!

Further Reading

• More photos courtesy of my camera and Kit’s camera. I’ve been careful to use only photos that don’t give away huge clues about where caches are in this blog post, but there may be spoilers in the other photos: you have been warned!
• Paul wrote a brief blog post about geocaching, too.
• The caches I’ve found and the ones I’ve hidden (more of the latter coming soon).

Friday night was Murder… In Space!, our most recent murder mystery party. This is the second of our murder mystery nights that I’ve been the author of (the first one was Murder In The Reign Of Terror), and I took a lot of what I learned from the experience of writing and co-hosting of that mystery… and then disregarded about half of it.

Me as the hologram of Ground Control Director Dan Griffin

One of the things that I thought we’d do differently from normal was a more “freeform” roleplaying experience. Instead of communal debates punctuated with pre-scripted dialogues, I wanted to create an atmosphere that felt more… like a group of people trapped together, where one is a murderer! I wanted distrust and backstabbing, secrets and lies. So instead of scripting dialogues and drip-feeding clues to the players between courses, I gave a lot more information “up front” and relied on the characters to develop their own social interactions, with mixed success.

Captain Rusty Schweiper (Adam) issues a mission patch to reporter Robyn Morse (Claire)

As I expected, I disregarded my own suggestion to myself to refrain from committing to a date for the event until I’d written at least half of the materials. Unfortunately, this was coupled with my incorrect assumption that writing a murder mystery in which I didn’t pre-script the dialogues would be somehow easier or faster than the contrary. Also my mistake in thinking that writing for ten people would only be 25% harder than writing for eight (in actual fact, complexity grows exponentially, because each person you add to a murder mystery has a theoretical relationship with everybody added before them).

Little red pieces of paper abound in the early stages of the game

The game proved challenging early on. Without the structure of initial dialogue and with no formal introduction phase, it took some time for the players to get into character and to understand what it was that they wanted to achieve and how they might go about it. In addition, a lot of the characters held their cards very close to their chest, metaphorically-speaking, to being with, resulting in a great shortage of “free” information during the first half of the game. However, the “space age” multicoloured cocktails did their work quickly, and after a sufficiency of liquid lubrication virtually everybody was slotting into their position in the group.

Helen Shaman (Ruth), the biologist

Once the players got into the swing of things, including (for those who’d attended this kind of event before) culturing an understanding that it was encouraged, perhaps even necessary, to meet up with fellow crewmembers in smaller groups and swap information and plot items – something that was new to this particular adventure – everything went a lot more smoothly. As I’d hoped, characters would take time to creep away in twos and threes and gossip about the others behind their backs. At least one character attempted to eavesdrop on others’ conversations, which was particularly amazing to see. In addition to the usual goal of “detect the murderer”/”make a clean getaway”, I’d issued each character with a set of secondary (and tertiary) goals that they’d like to achieve, typically related to learning something, preventing others from learning something, or acquiring or retaining a particular plot item. Some characters had more complex goals, relating to keeping the blame on or off particular other characters, making good early guesses, or being the first to achieve particular milestones. I felt that this added a richness to the characters which is otherwise sometimes lacking, and it seemed to work particularly well for helping the players play their roles, although I should probably have put the goals higher up on each player’s character sheet in order to make it clearer how important they were to the overall plot.

Robyn Morse (Claire), Sir Richard Virgin (Matt P), and Steven Win (JTA) in a private discussion

As usual, it was inspiring to see characters I’d invented brought to life in the interpretation of their players. As with Murder In The Reign Of Terror, I’d quite-deliberately avoided assigning characters to players, instead letting Ruth do that based on my preliminary character descriptions, thereby providing me with a number of surprises (and an even greater number of interesting coincidences) when it came to seeing how everybody chose to portray my ideas. Particular credit must go to Matt R for his stunning performance as the self-aware android, TALOS-III, and to Adam for the extraordinary amount of effort he put into his costume (including a silver jumpsuit, “moon boots”, and a cap and t-shirt emblazoned with his name, insignia, and the mission name). That said, everybody did an amazing job of making their character believable and love (or hate)-able for the characteristics they portrayed: there were moments at which it was easy to forget that this was all make-believe.

Adam's "moon boots"

As usual, Ruth put an unbelievable amount of work into making the food fit the theme, and she’d tried to have food that represented the nationalities of all of the astronauts present, in addition to making the food look like “space food”, even where it wasn’t (which resulted in the up-side that the foil containers out of which dinner was served needed no washing up when the party was finished). She’d also put a lot of thought into “space age” drinks, which mostly consisted of brightly-coloured cocktails prepared from ingredients brought by individual guests, which worked really well (although I apologise for the disparity that I’ve since discovered in the varied prices of the drinks people were asked to bring).

Pointing at the murderer, pilot James McDivvy.

As seems to have become traditional – although I swear that this is just another one of those coincidences – Paul’s character, James McDivvy, turned out to be the murderer: he’d poisoned the victim using carbon monoxide in his space suit’s air supply when he went for a spacewalk. In the photo above he’s seen holding a data disk containing the program that controls the TALOS-III android: he played upon the fact that nobody could find it to imply that whoever had it must have somehow used it to reprogram the android to perform the murder, playing upon everybody’s natural suspicion of the creepy robot amongst them, and this worked well for him, distracting many of the others from the evidence that would have implicated him. You can also clearly see Rory’s (Akiyama Toyohiro) fabulous SG-1/Japanese space geek costume, including his digital scrolling Twitter feed hanging around his neck.

Angharad (Svetlana Svetyona), a first-time Murder Night attendee

As usual, there are lessons to be learned. In the hope that I’ll pay some attention to myself next time (yes, there’ll be a “next time”, hopefully before I leave Aber – and I’m hoping to make something even bigger and cooler out of it), I’d like Future Dan to remember the following lessons:

• I know you’ll ignore this anyway, Future Dan, but do not commit to a date for a murder mystery until you’ve got at least half of it written already. There’s lots of stress, lots of panic, and a higher freqency of typos and other embarassing mistakes when you write the last few thousand words in the last day or two.
• Similarly, have more leeway for additional characters: I know it feels like “wasted words” to write for characters who’ll probably never be used, but it’s better to plan for about 10% of your cast to be playing optional characters, so that when they pull out (or more people want to come) you’re already prepared.
• Plan for a structured introduction round in which the host more-fully explains “the story so far”, and perhaps pre-script the first conversation(s) that players are likely to engage in, in order to make breaking into character a little less like diving in at the deep end.

Anybody got any other suggestions or feedback? Leave me a comment!

Further reading

• Ruth announces the event.
• There’s a full complement of photos available: hi-res on Flickr, low-res on Facebook. Huge thanks to Rory for taking most (the good ones) of these.
• Rory blogs after the event.
• Ruth thanks people for coming and making it a success.
• JTA makes a “belated report of murdery goodness.”

In the unlikely event that I’m not the only person who uses SuperGenPass to manage my passwords and MicroB on Maemo on my Nokia N900, here’s a few tips that I thought I’d share (they’re also valid on the N800 and N810 and “hacker edition” N770s, too, I expect):

• You don’t have a Bookmarks Toolbar (where would you put it on a 3 inch screen?), so once you’ve customised your SuperGenPass bookmarklet, you’ll need to click-and-hold on the generated link, and then select “Add bookmark” to save it to your bookmarks).
• Use it as normal: either fill your master password into the form and click your Bookmarks menu and select the bookmarklet, or select the bookmarklet and give it your master password. Don’t forget when using complex forms or changing passwords that Maemo provides a full clipboard so you can copy/paste passwords around where the need arises (thankfully quite rarely).
• If you’re irritated by the “You have requested an encrypted page that contains some unencrypted information” warnings that you see when logging into SSL-secured websites (and the fact that unlike desktop Firefox, you can’t turn it off from the settings), here’s how you disable it:
  • Enter the web address – about:config
  • Agree to the warning page, if you’re presented with one
  • Type “security.warn_viewing_mixed” into the search box, or browse the properties list for that option
  • Select it by clicking on it, and tap the Enter key to toggle it from true to false.
• I don’t yet know the reason for the fleeting “Maximum number of characters reached” message, but it doesn’t seem to impact on functionality of SuperGenPass. Does anybody else know what it’s about or how it can be suppressed?

Yesterday, I didn’t go to a wedding.

Act One – Not Going To A Wedding

The happy couple.

The wedding was Andy and Sins, of course, and they got married yesterday in Cardiff. Unfortunately, Ruth, JTA and I’s plans to go down there were conspired against by the combined forces of all of the worst luck imaginable. Allow me to elaborate.

The plan was simple. As soon as JTA could finish work, we’d suit-up, hop into Miriam (Ruth & JTA’s loveable, quirky litle car), and rocket down to Cardiff to join the party. And it could have gone so well, as a plan – JTA managed to finish work early, I dug out one of the most awesome ties ever, we’d even packed up a stack of inflatable beds so that anybody else who was planning to crash on the happy couple’s living room floor could also sleep in comfort.

But the problem was Miriam. Miriam, you little beast! She’d apparently been “sounding funny” during Ruth’s trip over to Aber on Thursday night, and – as a precaution – we decided to take her for a quick run out along the A44 to check that she was going to be okay for the journey to Cardiff. The plan wouldn’t be foiled even if there was a problem: we already had a backup plan to rent a car (probably for a whole week, as Ruth and JTA will somehow need to get to and from Oxford over the coming week).

It turns out that Ruth getting a second opinion – mine – was a good idea: yes, Miriam “sounds funny”, if by “sounds funny” you mean “judders and vibrates once you get above about 1000 revs, increasingly violently as you get above third gear, and ocassionally cuts out entirely at higher speeds.” Honestly, I suspect she might have been safe, but she certainly wasn’t healthy, so, after (correctly, it later turns out) guessing that the problem was that one or more cylinders were periodically (read: virtually always) failing to fire, we ditched her and went looking for a rental.

We toddled along to Europcar (don’t be fooled by the picture: that’s not what Aberystwyth Europcar’s offices look like), and asked what they had available for hire for a week. “Nothing,” came the reply. “What about just for today?” we asked. “Nothing,” came the reply, again, “We always sell out at about this time on a Friday.”

They suggested we try Hertz out in Llanbadarn, so I gave them a bell. “You want it for today, do you?” came the reply, in a distinctly Welsh accent twinged with only a little incredulity. There was the sound of paperwork being filed in the background. “I’m afraid we’ve got nothing at all today.”

“Is there anybody else I could try, other than you and Europcar?” I asked, “We’re trying to get to a wedding in Cardiff and our car has broken down.”

“You might try – what are they called? – AV Van Hire, out in Glanyrafon. I think that they used to have a car that they used to rent out, sometimes.” This was our last chance, so I thanks the lady from Hertz and went about phoning her competitor in the industrial estate.

I explained the situation to the friendly-sounding man who answered the phone.

“Yeah. We’ve got a Ford Galaxy here that you can borrow.”

“Really? That’s great! How much for a day’s rental?”

“Yell you what – you get over here and we’ll talk about that when you get here.” Hmm. Not sure how to take that – leaves the opportunity to haggle, I suppose, but he could be the kind who wants to size-up his customers first, and the fact that I’m wearing a suit won’t necessarily work financially in our favour. Still, running out of options at this point, so Ruth & I grabbed JTA and jumped into a taxi out to the industrial estate.

Finding the place was more than a little challenging. The taxi driver didn’t know where they were, so eventually we just had him drop us off at the DHL Parcel Depot and called the rental place again. He said he’d send round the car to pick us up, and a few minutes later it arrived.

The Galaxy had taken a bump at some point in it's life, so - not wanting to risk being ripped-off for causing damage that already existed - I took this picture

“It’s… big,” said Ruth, as we hopped into the Ford Galaxy (Mk2). And she was right – you could comfortably seat seven in this beast. Bear in mind that Miriam’s a very small car – she sometimes look as if the two rear passenger doors were added as an afterthought – and you can see why what is, essentially, only a little smaller than a minibus, might be a little intimidating to her.

The chap at the rental place was as friendly as he’d sounded, and, after talking a little about fuel economy and turning circles, made us a really good offer. “Great,” I said, “We’ll take it!” We wandered upstairs into the plywood “office” that hung above their maintenance garage.

“Have you got your license?” he asked, and Ruth produced hers. He started tapping details into a computer and filling out forms, and then stopped and looked at it again. “Umm: how long have you been driving?” he asked.

“18 months,” she said.

“And you?” he said to JTA.

“17?” he guessed, and then checked his license to confirm that this guess was correct. The friendly man turned to me.

“I’m taking my test next month,” I replied.

He pointed at the documents in front of him, where it clearly stated that while the insurance company that they used could insure anybody over the age of 21, they needed to have two years of driving experience. He flicked backward and forth through the paperwork, looking for an exception clause (they were a reasonably liberal-minded insurer, even willing to take on drivers with convictions, but had no flexibility on this one clause… unlike, we later learned, Europcar’s insurers), before giving up.

And that was that. Our last hope, sat out in their driveway, ready for us to rent but illegal for us to take off the premises: as good as useless. We’d checked the public transport options already and determined that the best we could hope to achieve might be to arrive at Andy & Sian’s house right as they happy couple would be retiring to their matrimonial bed (can you think of a better way to make yourself welcome than that?), and that’s if there weren’t any delays. Dejected, we finally gave up. The friendly man had one of his employees (possibly his son?) drive us back to Aber.

Act Two – Doing Something Else Instead

So, in true Friday night tradition, we did what we usually do: had Troma Night, our regular weekly film night. Of course, few could make it (just Sam; Paul visited briefly; and Kit and Fiona turned up late on). In accordance with the prophecy, and perhaps a little in order to feel like we were less-badly separated from our friends on their special day, we themed Troma Night around them.

We stayed in our wedding-wear, watched films about weddings, toasted the happy couple, and wallowed in the fact that we could’t be there with them. Briefly – and with thanks to Matt R – we got to speak to the bride by phone and wish her well, which was nice, but it’s not quite the same. We promise that we’ll try to get down there and visit you sometime soon!

Champagne and flowers at Troma Night 290

Folks Dressed-Up At Troma Night 290

Some Of The Films For Troma Night 290

Ruth pops open (yet) another bottle of bubbly at Troma Night 290

Sam arrives at Troma Night 290 - for those of you who haven't met Sam yet, he's the leader of a small nocturnal group of filing-cabinet kickers up on campus, if you know what I mean.

Dan and Ruth at Troma Night 290

JTA and Ruth at Troma Night 290

The other evening, I was woken (yes, I was asleep at 6pm, might blog about why that was on a later date) by a man from one of the energy companies trying to get me to consider changing my gas supply to them. I’m not keen on door-to-door sales at the best of times, which, coupled with my why-have-you-woken-me-up attitude and a hint of my mischievousness, lead to a conversation that I’m sure he won’t soon forget.

Gas Man:
Hi, I’m from [name of energy company - he was keen to show off his shiny ID badge] and… oh; I’m sorry, have I just woken you up? Is this a bad time?

Dan:
/yawning/ Yeah, but I’m up now. What can I do for you?

Gas Man:
I might be able to save you money on your gas bill. Can I ask who you’re with now?

Dan:
I’m with [name of my energy company].

Gas Man:
Right, and do you pay quarterly or monthly?

Dan:
Monthly, by direct debit.

Gas Man:
Okay. Do you know how much you spend per month on gas?

Dan:
Hey, do you have any samples?

Gas Man:
What? Umm… I’ve got a leaflet if you’d like…

Dan:
No: samples. Of the gas your company provides.

Gas Man:
/laughing it off as a joke/ Ha! No… so do you know how much your average bill…

Dan:
/completely serious face/ I’m afraid I’d have to smell your gas before I could make any kind of decision.

Gas Man:
/stunned silence/

Dan:
I’ve been with a few different gas companies over the years. When I first moved in I was with [name of energy company]. Their gas smelled like walnuts, and I don’t like walnuts, so I switched to [name of another energy company], and their gas used to smell like cottage cheese, which was fine, but eventually it started smelling like it had gone off which means it probably was actual cottage cheese: which is great, but you can’t just put cottage cheese in your pipe and never replace it, can you? So that’s when I switched to [name of my energy company], about three months ago. Their gas smells like watermelons, which is perfectly good. I like watermelons.

/pause/

So you see; I couldn’t possibly buy your company’s gas unless I could smell it first.

/I continue staring at him with wide, “I inhale flammable gases for fun” look/

Gas Man:
Umm. All the gas is the same. It doesn’t matter which company supplies it: it’s all the same gas.

Dan:
Oh.

/puzzled look/

Then I guess I’ll stick with the gas I’ve got, if yours is no different. Goodbye.

/closes door/

(I assumed he’d already have head of this, of course)

I’ve just got myself a new mobile phone, and I thought I’d spend a moment to gloat about some of it’s more awesome features (and mutter under my breath about a few of the things that are less-fabulous about it).

So, my new phone is a Nokia N900. You’re not likely to have seen many of these floating around, yet, because they’re new to the UK and they’re currently in somewhat short supply, but thanks to some careful negotiation I’ve gotten my clammy mits on one just a little ahead of the curve.

I’m now loathe to say what I was initially inclined to about it – that it’s quite a remarkable phone – because it’s not really a phone (although it is quite remarkable). As somebody who has always gone for smartphones with heaps of geeky features, I’ve often gone through conversations like the one in the comic, above: where somebody has said “but can it make calls?” These comments tend to come from people who want a phone that makes calls, maybe sends texts, and little else, and often this “purist” view of mobile telephony somebody gives them a strange superiority complex (or perhaps it’s just a backlash against the feature-creep of modern portable devices: who knows). As for me, I don’t care – I want all of those extra features. I couldn’t imagine any more owning a phone without – at least – a fully-featured web browser, camera, bluetooth, wifi, and the capability for me to install (and ideally develop) my own applications onto it, such as connectivity tools, an instant messenger, and so on.

A Nokia N900 on a phone call

However, the Nokia N900 is the first communicator – yes, that’s the word I’m going to use, instead – where I’ve honestly felt that the telephony features “come second”. I suppose it’s the result of the natural progression of Nokia’s Nxxx range of PDAs that this should be the case – the N900 is the first in the series to actually support use of a mobile phone network at all; at least directly. In the device’s default configuration, out-of-the-box, supposing you wanted to make a cellular call, you’d need to:

1. Switch desktops (by “swiping” one desktop along) or access the applications menu (by tapping the on-screen button for that purpose).
2. Tap the “Phone” icon, which by default sits in 6th place on the list. Yes, 6th.
3. Dial the number you wanted to call.

That’s about 66% steps more than just about any other phone ever made. (okay, there’s actually a faster way, but supposing you wanted to exclusively use the touch-screen interface, the above instructions are correct) I know a lot of people who would be put off by that, but I’m not one of them: I’m well past the point where phone calls are the primary thing I use my phone for!

There’s a few things that make the Nokia N900 remarkable by comparison to the phones I’ve had before:

Touchscreen (& hidden keyboard)

Superficially, the major change to my previous phones is the addition of a touchscreen, which seems to be The Thing if you want to make a smartphone these days, thanks to Apple’s innovations in that area. Unusually, the N900 also has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The slide-out keyboard takes some getting used to, because it’s best operated by your thumbs, which isn’t the way I’m used to using a keyboad. It also makes the phone almost twice as thick as the iPhone and slightly thicker than the HTC Magic, which may be a turn-off to those who like their devices skinny (again, not something that’s ever been a concern to me).

I’m quite pleased with the touchscreen. There’s a stylus embedded in the edge of the case (this is a resistive touchscreen, not a capacitative one like the iPhone, so a stylus can be used), which can be good for clicking tiny links on web pages without zooming in, sketching, and so on, but mostly I’ve just been using my big chunky fingers and that’s worked fine. While the hardware’s multitouch-capable, the factory-installed software isn’t (more on that later), presumably to avoid a lawsuit (there are a lot of complicated patents in that area right now), but having never owned a multitouch-capable phone I don’t miss it. Instead, there’s a good deal of standardised gestures – for example, drawing a spiral in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction can be used to zoom in and out.

The keyboard noticibly lacks a tab key, norkies (angle-brackets), and a few other uncommon pieces of punctuation, which is slightly disappointing (for a geek phone!), because acessing these using the alternate method is just slightly slower than would be ideal. Perhaps these could have been supplied as “special” characters on some of the keys which have no alternate function (e.g. the cursor keys): still, it should be reasonably easy to write this kind of functionality.

Operating System & architecture

Maemo OS screenshot

A particularly unusual feature of the Nokia N900 is it’s choice of operating system. It’s not that Linux-based smartphones are particularly rare per se – after all, Google Android is Linux-powered and the iPhone OS is based on a BSD kernel – but the thinking that’s behind the N900 that is unusual. You see, the N900 gives you root as-standard. If you want to install a different Linux distribution or completely change the one that comes with the device, you can – without “jailbreaking” the device or invalidating your warranty. The standard operating system for the N900, Maemo 5, is based on Debian Linux but with Matchbox and Hildon providing the GUI. This means that the entire operating system is open-source and virtually free of patents and restrictions, and the community support is quite significant. Plus, there’s something distinctly sexy about opening up a terminal on your new phone and typing “sudo apt-get install dosbox” onto it, and a few minutes later having a fully-functional DOS emulator running in your pocket.

I suppose you have to be my kind of geek to truly appreciate that.

Fresh from the factory, the N900 comes with the usual selection of tools – phone, SMS (Nokia have finally improved their stone-age predictive text system to a modern one with support for word-completion, Markov chains, and so on), address book, web browser (based on Mozilla Firefox, and with Flash 9.6 support – there’s nothing quite like watching Flash videos on your mobile, stutter-free), etc. There’s quite a lot more reliance on the community than on other devices: for example, despite the inlusion of an FM tuner in the hardware, there’s no software to support it unless you install it yourself. As a Linux geek, that suits me down to the ground, but this isn’t a phone for everybody – it’ll never be popular and it won’t hit the mainstream in the way that the iPhone and Android-powered phones have.

Want support for Ogg Vorbis in your media player (damn right you do): just install a community-supported codec package. Same goes for video formats, whatever applications or games you want, and so on. There’s a package to readily allow plain old Debian repo packages to “just work” on it, too, without recompilation, so there’s an immense number of applications already available without even having to go near the Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to the Android Marketplace and the Apple App Store.

The hardware

Nokia N900 with keybord extended

If you’re the kind of geek who cares, the hardware for this device is really quite spectacular. But if you’re that kind of geek, you already know where to look it up… and if you’re not, you don’t need me to repeat it. Suffice to say that the N900 is nippy and responsive even when performing intensive tasks (like simultaneously restoring archives from parity files while listening to radio repeats on iPlayer and playing 3D-accelerated video games), thanks to a generous amount of RAM and a good seperation of responsibilities between the three (yes, three) individual processor cores.

This is a geek’s device, and it comes with all kinds of surprising extras for developers to tap into. As well as Bluetooth, the tilt sensors and accelerometers (some idiot has already written an app that detects how high you can throw your N900 based on what planet you’re on and the accelerometer readings – sounds like a quick way to break your new toy, to me!), two cameras (one a 5MP one, like the high-end Nseries phones), it’s even got an infared transmitter, so you’re only a copy of LIRC away from a universal remote, too.

Thanks to last year’s industry standards agreement, the N900 uses the new “standardised” mobile phone charger, so at least you shouldn’t have to throw out your charger ever again (at least, until mobile phones start charging by induction, as standard), and you’ll always be able to charge from USB. But in a genuine bit of Nokia care, the N900 box also contains an adapter that can be used to convert any old-style or even old-old-style Nokia charger into the new standard format, which is a world of awesome (what else was I going to do with my collection of Nokia chargers?). Thanks for thinking of us, Nokia. Oh: and the environment, I guess.

And now, the things I don’t like

It’s not all rainbows and kittens, though. There’s a few things about the N900 that haven’t won all of my praise and support just yet:

• Why do virtually all of the default apps run exclusively in either “portrait” or “landscape” mode? Some applications will automatically switch when you rotate the phone, but not all of them: personally, I like to be able to browse the web in “portrait” from time to time! I’m sure it’ll be patched soon enough, but it’s a minor annoyance for now.
• It would have been nice to have a physical “Task Manager” button on the device, for when a full-screen application has made the standard one inaccessible (this isn’t the iPhone – this is a true multitasking machine – so being able to switch apps “fast” would be nice, like we could on Symbian). On the other hand, there’s an app for that.
• There’s no native A2DP support, so those “next track”/”previous track” buttons on your Bluetooth headset are officially useless. Would this really have been so hard to have in the standard package? Can somebody write it, please?
• There are a few teething bugs in the first release of the Mail For Exchange package, which I use to synchronise my address book and calendar with my online accounts, resulting in some synchronisations simply failing (although failing-safely, of course: no data was damaged). Considering that Nokia have had working code to do this for several years now, porting it and then testing the port really shouldn’t have been so difficult.

So there we have it

An official thumbs-up from me, so long as you’re a geek and don’t mind the fact that this phone is – for the next month or two, I suspect – going have have the kinds of teething problems I’ve listed above. I’ll reiterate that this isn’t a phone for a regular Joe: if you’re not going to appreciate the freedom you’ve got with a device like this, you’d be better to save your money and get a HTC Nexus One or iPhone 3GS, or hold on for a couple of months and check out the spectacular-looking Sony Ericcson XPERIA X10.

The N900 is a phone for people with balls and a passion for the most open of open-source. And it’s awesome.

Normal blogging will resume shortly, but I just wanted to quickly take advantage of a period of strong mobile signal as I sit on this Thames Travel bus (oh yeah: I’m in Oxford for a few days) to share with you a feeling of warm fuzziness I experienced earlier today. (note: this blog post took a few days to get “finished”: I’m now stuck in a small town outside Oxford by heavy snow)

In her latest blog post, my sister Becky writes about achieving a couple of things on her “to-do before I die” list. And when I read about her revelations about the nature of domestic abuse and her selfless willingness to go out of her way to help her fellow man, I was filled with an immense sense of pride.

I’ll remind you that, unlike about a fifth of the regular readers of this blog, my sister has no formal training or experience in active listening or counselling skills. She’s never been taught how to listen without prejudice, how to build rapport, or how to show empathy. She knows that this certainly isn’t part of her job description. What we’re looking at there is plain old, genuine human compassion. And it makes me proud not only of her – as my sister – but also of humankind in general, that this kind of caring for one another still exists, even for a stranger, within the general population. That’s simply awesome.

In other not-dissimilar human-compassion related news, Ruth and I were offered a lift – saving us a two-mile walk through the snow, after midnight – by two complete strangers the other night, after our bus was cancelled. It’s been a good week for stories of people being nice to one another, both in my immediate experience and in the news. I like it.

On the other hand: here the snow is thick and heavy! Paul and I made it to Preston in the end, after a series of train journeys along an unusual route (but, remarkably, virtually all running on time). From Aberystwyth, it’s genuinely challenging to appreciate how significantly the recent snowfall has impacted on the rest of the UK. By Dyfi Junction the train staff were warning about the conditions on the unploughed platforms, and at Manchester, unused platform ends lay heavy with slush piled up around the tracks.

Snow piles up in my dad's garden - still several inches thick despite a damp night

The major roads are swept, but the side roads are piled high with drifts and it’s hard to see (or even feel) the speed bumps in the residential estates. Apparently, the other night one of my sisters – Becky – had to drive into town to collect the other – Sarah – as she couldn’t get a taxi home after a night out… because the taxi drivers were refusing to drive through the snow that littered my mum’s estate.

A cat's footprints winding their way across my dad's garden

It’s quite remarkable to see this much snow here – the most I’ve seen anywhere in England in about fourteen years. We may well be having a white Christmas yet!

Aberystwyth this morning. Not a patch of snow to be seen, not even on the hills.

This year, my plan was that my friend Paul and I would head up to Preston to spend Christmas with my family there. My sisters even kindly offered to drive down and pick us up, which is nice , because the alternative for moving the presents I’ve got boxed up in my living room would be to strap them onto a sled and find some livestock to tow them up North. I’m not sure where I’d find animals around here capable of running a sleigh: how many sheep do you think it takes to pull a grown man, his clothes for a week, and a stack of gifts?

When I received a text this morning saying that Preston was, functionally-speaking, snowed-in, I was at least a little surprised. I opened the curtains: here in Aber it’s reasonably warm, mild, and sunny, with not even a hint of snow – not even on the distant mountains. It’s hard to believe that from only a hundred or so miles away the snow is so thick that it’s having to be ploughed off the road, and that in the South-East, drivers have had to spend the nights in their cars after roads became unusable.

So… I might make it out of Aber by Christmas. If anybody can tell me where the nearest magic reindeer farm with lax security is, it’d be appreciated.

pudd /pd/ (verb, third-person singular simple present pudds, present participle pudding, simple past pudded, past participle pudd)

1. (transitive) to cause an observer to interpret meaning where none exists
   “The beauty of the sunset pudds me into believing that it was put there specifically for me to enjoy.”
   “Interpreting the lyrics pudded Dan with ideas far beyond those intended by the songwriter.”
   
   
2. (intransitive) to interpret meaning (esp. into the meaningless)
   “Though I don’t understand your grunting, I pudd that you are angry about something.”
   “Despite the emptiness of her life, Mary was pudding.”

pudd /pd/ (noun, pl. pudds)

1. The meaning or purpose of something, as understood through individual interpretation, without specific indication any such meaning exists.
   “His pudd is that life is for having fun while it lasts.”
   “Pudds are easy to find when you’re looking for them.”

For some reason – perhaps saturation of the word in my brain that mirrored the saturation of the food in my stomach at and following last weekend’s feast – I lost the meaning to the word “pudding”. I’d stare at it, but it didn’t make any sense – it was just a collection of letters. I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar at some point in your life.

But then an unusual thing happened: my brain began to see it in a different way, almost adding meaning to it. My imagination whirred. The part of my brain responsible for recognising the components of language, which has recently been spoiled by the regularity and predictability of Esperanto, began to see the word “pudding” as the present participle form of a verb, “to pudd”. I pudd, you pudded, we’re pudding, everybody pudds.

There’s no English verb, “to pudd”, that I’m aware of, so I’ve invented one. The definition is based on the experience that lead me to inventing it, and as a result it is at least a little bit recursive. The definition is as above. I’ve invented an accompanying derivative noun, too. I anticipate that the intransitive verb form is the most useful of the three definitions: in fact, I’ll be using it in this very article.

I don’t pudd that I was somehow supposed to do this; that my temporary inability to comprehend a word was destined to have me invent one: and if you’re pudding that right now, you’re mistaken. But if you must find pudd in this whole jolly story, perhaps you can just settle on that I am a fan of language, and at least a little bit eccentric. Isn’t that enough?

The week before last, I received an unusual package at work. It contained a single-serving packet of organic hot chocolate, which I later consumed (and it was delicious).

There is, however, a mystery: from whom did this care package originate. The postmark is unclear, so I’m not sure which post office handled it, but it’s hard to imagine somebody who lived in Aberystwyth spending 69p to have this delivered to me when they could have just dropped it in themselves.

The back of the envelope may be considered a clue, too:

It looks like the envelope has been re-used, which suggests that the sender was the recipient of the original package, which seems to have come from Toronto, Canada, back in March 2009.

Aside from that, all we know is that the mystery sender’s handwriting is a little sloppy.

If it’s you that sent it: thanks! But who the hell are you?

I believe that it is ethically wrong to lie to children about the existence of Santa Claus. And, as it’s a topical time of year – and because I know that this view brings me into conflict with the views of many others (I’ve certainly had more than a couple of arguments about this before) – I thought that I’d explain my thinking.

"I'm not real... but don't tell anyone!"

Bias of background

I probably ought to come clean, first, about my own background. There’s a certain bias that people can have towards their own upbringing: the implicit assumption that the way one was brought up is somehow the best or the most-correct way.I’d like to think that I’m speaking from a position of rationality as well as morality, but I can’t deny that my judgment may be clouded by my own childhood.

I never believed that Santa was real, and was never encouraged to. My family played out a whole variety of modern, secular Christmas traditions, such as leaving out a mince pie for Santa, hanging stockings, and decorating a tree. But these were always understood to be what they actually were. There was never an illusion that the mince pie wasn’t being eaten by my dad just minutes after he’d checked that I’d finally managed to curb my excitement get to sleep (even without a belief in the patently mythological, Christmas can still be an exciting time for a child).

What’s the harm?

When I was growing up, I came into contact with many children for whom the Father Christmas myth was very real. I gather that they’re still remarkably common… and who can blame parents: perpetuating the Santa lie can provide a very easy and pervasive way to control the behaviour of their children!

For the vast majority of these children, the revelation of the lie was a harmless experience: over time, they developed doubts, from the childish (“We don’t have a chimney? How can Santa slide down radiators?”), to the logical (“Reindeer can’t fly! And how big is a sleigh that can carry presents for every good child on Earth?”), to the profound (“Why does Santa give the children of rich parents more expensive gifts than the children of poor parents?”). They’d hear stories from other children about the falsehood of the Christmas stories when they spoke to other children or, often, older siblings. Many would eventually challenge their parents on these lies, and most of these parents would then come clean, correctly judging that the lie had run it’s course. So what’s the harm?

There are some children who didn’t come off so well. I’ve seen children bullied at school and in social settings as a result of clinging to their belief in Santa. One kid I knew – bolstered by his mother’s ongoing lies (she would later claim that she thought he knew, but was just “playing along”) – genuinely believed in Santa until he was 14 years old, defying all argument to the contrary, and suffered so much that he ceased to gain any enjoyment at all from the festival for years to come.

I’ve spoken to parents who have attempted to justify their decision to lie to their children by dismissing it as only “a white lie”, something which does more good than harm, and I can see their argument. But for some children, as we’ve seen, this lie can spiral out of control, and even if this were to happen with only one in a thousand children, I wouldn’t personally want to take the risk that it was a child of mine.

One of Santa's biggest benefits is that he has a list of where all the naughty girls live.

That Magical Christmas Feeling

A common response to my claim that lying to children about Santa is ethically wrong is that there is something particularly special (or “magical”, it is often said) about being able to believe in Santa. Those who make this claim invariably come from a background in which they were encouraged to believe in him, and they frequently talk of wanting their children to be able to have the same experience as them. (I would speculate that there’s a large crossover between this group of people and the group of people who would rather their children were brought up with their religious beliefs, or lack thereof, than be given the opportunity to make their own choices, too).

Having experienced life as an a-santaist, I can say that there never for a moment felt like there was something missing from my childhood Christmases. Children have a rich and beautiful imagination and a way of looking at the world which will find wonder and magic, if they want it, regardless of the untruths they’re told. Imposing false beliefs as truths on healthy young minds does not result in a net addition of “magic”. At best, all that is achieved is that the child fantasies about a specific lie, perhaps one that the child’s caregivers can relate to. We’ve discussed a couple of the worth cases already, and these aren’t isolated incidents.

Christmas can be a magical time anyway. There’s time away from school (for children of schoolgoing age), a chance to see distant relatives, the giving and receiving of presents (how can I have left this until third in the list!), following unusual and exciting traditions, eating special food, the potential for snow (at least in this hemisphere), and a time for telling special stories and singing special songs. Special events are magical, and that’s true whether or not you subscribe to any particular religious or secular holidays. For a child, birthdays are magical, bonfire night is magical (ooh! fireworks!), the summer solstice is magical: whatever you’ve got can be magical when you’ve got a child’s imagination.

Think back to whatever family traditions you had as a child, especially the ones you had to wait a whole year for. They’re all special, all by themselves. You can enjoy eating delicious chocolate eggs without believing in either a magical rabbit with a confusing reproductive system, the crucifixion of the embodiment of a deity, or spring coming forth thanks to the earned favour of the fertility gods. Sorry, what were you saying? I was still thinking about chocolate.

Santana - a full 100% more real, but only 95% less magical - than Santa

So, no Santa at all, then?

If you were paying attention, you’ll have seen that I said “telling special stories and singing special songs”. My childhood was a secular one, certainly, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t full of stories of a jolly red man, songs about cervines with nasal photoluminescence, and so on. I enjoyed stories about a gift-giving magical man, just like I enjoyed stories about anthropomorphic talking animals: and it’s okay to understand these things for just what they are: stories! There’s perhaps something a little special in stories about Father Christmas in that they’re told pretty-much exclusively at Christmas time (and, perhaps, a little much – how many Christmas-themed movies are scheduled for television broadcast this winter?), but we don’t have to treat them as if they’re real.

My rules are pretty simple. If you (a) know something to be false and (b) teach it to a child to be real with (c) the intent for them to believe it wholeheartedly and for an extended period of time, you’re abusing the position of trust in which that child has placed you. (a) provides an exception for religious upbringing, (b) provides an exception for relationships in which there is not a disparity of power, and (c) provides an exception for whatever so-called “white lies” you feel that you need: that’s a pretty hefty lump of exceptions, if you need them – but still people raise objections.

Here’s what Santa means to me. To me, “Santa” is, and has always been, the embodiment of anonymous gift-giving: the genuine “spirit of Christmas”, if you like. And given my way, that would be what I’d want to teach my children, too. I’m not for a moment denying anybody the magic of the season, I’m just saying that there’s a big difference between Santa as an abstract concept (like a storm “wanting” to break) and Santa as a real, albeit magical, being (like Poseidon sending the storm).

It’s a matter of trust

For me, this all comes down to trust. I don’t want to lie to my children. It’s not a difficult concept to understand: the only difference between me and a large number of other people is that they choose a different definition of “lie”. For the virtually all children who discover that they’ve been deceived about Santa, their trust in their parents remains fundamentally unharmed. For some, it’s dented for a short while but then comes back. But this still doesn’t make it right.

I want to be somebody who my children will always know that they can trust. I want them to know that I will not lie to them or deceive them. I want to be somebody who they can turn to for advice. I want to be somebody who they know will put them first, even in spite of tradition and convention.

That’s where I stand. Let’s here what you guys think.

Now this is the kind of Santa that I can get behind.

But first, there’s one more argument…

…that I’ve heard recently. I’ve heard it put that it’s beneficial to lie to children about Santa because it teaches them not to trust everything they hear, teaches them to be critical thinkers, etc.. That being taught a lie will toughen them against other lies that they will be given to them later in the big, wide, and cruel world.

This argument holds no weight with me. Do these same parents like to beat up their children “just a little” so that if they get into a fight at school, it won’t be so bad? Do they lock up and abuse their kids so that if they’re kidnapped and raped that it isn’t so hard on them?

In my mind, a lie that you keep up for years on end is no longer a harmless lie. When I want to teach my kids about deceit, I’ll perform magic tricks for them. The first time you perform a magic trick for a child, they genuinely believe it – how did he make that coin appear from behind my ear? Leave it for a minute or so (a minute can be an eternity when you’re a kid). Then I’ll show them how it’s done. I’ll teach them to do the trick themselves, and they’ll see for themselves that magic is an illusion. Plus, they’ll have learned a cool trick.

The world is full of many very clever illusions and tricks, and often you can’t see how they’re done, but that doesn’t mean that they’re magic. There’s no shame in not knowing all the answers, but looking for answers is a noble and beautiful thing. I want to foster in my children a natural suspicion of magic, so that they’re better-able to avoid being conned by those who would do them harm. And I can achieve this without lying to them for more than a few minutes at a time. Shove that in your stocking, Santa.

DISCLAIMER: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE NATURE OF SANTA CLAUS. IF YOU BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS, PERHAPS YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE READ IT.

No offence intended to those who genuinely believe that Poseidon is the master of storms, naturally.

A very brief summary of some of the things I got up to last weekend with Ruth:

Nottingham

• Alice Cooper concert in Nottingham.
• Absolutely spectacular: it’s amazing that this over-60-year-old man can spend a couple of hours singing and dancing and leaping around and being executed – I was tired just watching him.
• Great to hear a setlist with a good mix of his older material as well as stuff from his latest album. Vengeance Is Mine was particularly brilliant to see performed live.
• Support band Man-Raze were pretty good, too.

Grange-over-sands

• Wedding of my old college friend Richard to his wife Kathryn.
• He works as a tax inspector these days, and we found ourselves sat at a table of his tax inspector buddies and their (bored-looking, during a brief period in which they were “talking shop”) partners.
• Think we managed to upset the bride quite a lot (although, to be fair, we were only the messengers): after picking up a slice of wedding cake and returning to the table we presently shared with the bride and groom, Ruth turned to the bride and said “We must have missed you cutting the cake?” She replied, “We… we didn’t cut the cake, yet!” Whoops. Turns out that the hotel staff got the wrong end of the stick somewhere and sliced the cake for them!

Ruth with a large cone of ice cream, at about midnight.

Preston

• Was nice to see my family. Sarah and Ruth seem to be getting along a lot better than they used to, as well.
• Preston has a late-night ice cream parlour! How cool is that? (I know perfectly well that it sounds like slang for a drug dealer, as in, “I’m going to the late-night ice cream parlour: want some tutti frutti?”, or perhaps a brothel)

A discussion at SmartData this morning:

Dan: (eating a kiwi fruit) So why are kiwis hairy?
Gareth: To give insects something to cling onto?
Dan: Like “kiwi headlice”? But to what purpose? How does that benefit the plant?
Gareth: Well, then maybe it’s to make them look even more like gonads.
Dan: Heh. But again, to what purpose?
Gareth: To attract homosexual male humans to it, perhaps.
Dan: Which gives it an evolutionary advantage how?
Gareth: Well, homosexual men are better at disseminating seed.

I’d just like to take a moment to say how amazing my friends are. It’s likely to be a little sappy: for those of you who like your blog posts on the other side of the wall, please switch off your eyes now.

Earlier this month, I blogged about Claire and I’s break-up. For many of the people I know, this will have been the very first they’ll have heard about it. Over the 36 hours or so that followed, I was completely swamped by consolations and concern: by comment, text message, Facebook, instant message, e-mail and phone – as well as in person from those I’ve seen in the meantime. Every single one of those messages is appreciated so very much. Thank you all.

And that’s not even mentioning the check-ins that people have made in the weeks since. It’s so kind of you all. I hope that Claire’s feeling as supported as I’ve been lucky enough to feel.

So how’s it going? That’s what everybody asks. Well…

…it’s still difficult. I’m not sure why I might have expected anything else: Claire and I were together for a quarter of my life so far. I still cry quite a lot, especially when Grooveshark Radio conspires against me and decides to queue up a whole series of songs that remind me of her. I don’t see as much of her as I used to, and I miss her, but when we’re together I often find it quite painfully awkward: even just down to little things, like the times that I realise that for the last few minutes I’d forgotten we aren’t a couple. I’m intensely keen on us being friends, and at least salvaging the awesome friendship we’ve shared for most of the millenium, but it’s not as comfortable as I’d like.

As I’ve said to a handful of people, now: without Claire, there’s no compelling reason for me to stay in Aberystwyth, so in the New Year, I’ll be aiming to leave town. I’m not sure where I’ll go, yet, or what I’ll do, but I’ve got some ideas. Today, I told my boss about my situation and that I’d like to start taking steps to make sure that the company can do without me: the joy of small-team development, eh?

When I first came to town, I promised myself that I wouldn’t get caught in the trap of being “stuck” here. I realised that Aberystwyth was a place that I could really fall in love with, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t stay more than ten years.

That was ten years and two months ago. I think it’s time to leave my love behind.

Paul as Sir Percy Blubbery

Apologies to those who’ve been waiting to see the photographs. Since my last blog post I’ve been kind of distracted and not had the chance to blog properly.

On Friday 31st October, Ruth hosted another of her fabulous murder mystery nights in Paul’s end of The Uberflat. The major difference with this one to all of the previous ones, though, was that instead of opening and playing a “kit”, this murder mystery was written by me.

And wow; it turns out that writing a murder mystery night is actually quite a lot of work. It’s like writing ten separate stories at the same time, which must all be internally-consistent with one another, but simultaneously must all neglect information that is known to one another in a dynamic and engaging way. After a few months of it (on and off) and a week or two of it (every spare waking hour) I felt like I had an understanding of the characters I’d invented so intimate that even their own imaginary mothers would be put to shame by my encyclopedic knowledge of them.

Adam as Mr. Gerry Knuckles

In order to minimise the risk that I would simply write the plot such that Paul would be the murderer (we’ve an ongoing joke about Paul always being the murderer, after he was for a couple of murder mysteries in a row), I didn’t choose who would play which character. Instead, I wrote a number of different characters and left it up to Ruth to match them up with guests.

This also had the added benefit, in my mind, that the characters were not written to match the people who would play them: and as a result, I was pleasantly surprised to see my creations brought to life through the improvisation of my friends, interpreting the characters as they saw fit.

I was remarkably nervous about whether or not I’d “got it right”: had I given enough detail about the characters that the guests would feel comfortable performing them, but not so much detail that they would feel stifled and unable to add their own flair to them? Had I given enough clues as to who the murderer was, but not so many as to make it obvious? Had I written enough dialogue for the time planned? Was the plot sufficiently gripping that the guests would actually care about defending their characters to the bitter end?

Dr. Manatee and his daughter, Lucie; as played by JTA and by Ruth's mother

My fears weren’t helped by the fact that I had to make a number of last-minute changes to the script to accommodate the fact that Rory – one of the guests – had a family emergency and had to drop out. By the time I’d finished (re-)writing the last of the dialogue, I still hadn’t had a chance to read through all of the script and make sure that all the loose ends were tied up: and, in fact, they weren’t, as I discovered to my horror some way through the night.

Mlle. Plosh and Mr. John Basterd; played by Claire and Matt P

The evening kicked off reasonably well. There was a little awkwardness, as usual, as people tried to fit into the shells of their characters, but – again, as usual – the guests’ reservations turned out to be soluble in alcohol, and by the time everybody had gotten a drink inside them, things began to pick up steam. A second cause of difficulty at the beginning of the night is that nobody knew who they were supposed to be in relation to everybody else. I had expected that Ruth (who had told everybody who they were) had sent the full character list to everybody who was coming, but owing to a mis-communication between the pair of us she’d only sent everybody their own character description. As a result, we had whole families of characters who were not aware that they were supposed to already know one another. Thankfully I’d reprinted this information on the inside cover of the sourcebooks, and handed these out as people came in through the door, which resolved the issue.

Re-branded wine. Who brought this? I don't remember.

Yet again, Ruth produced a fantastic and wonderfully theme-fitting meal, with a variety of French-themed, freshly-made courses. Paul, again as usual, put together a playlist of music of the period. Everybody’s costumes were superb, right down to the detail of Dr. Manatee’s eccentric quirks (JTA brought a spoon which he constantly fiddled with and refused to let anybody else touch) and Sir. Percy Blubbery’s wonderfully accurate English aristocrat’s clothes (Paul had sent me a text a week or so before the event in which he’d derided my costume suggestion for him and proposed his own, based on his research into the period).

A remarkable number of people, and particularly Ruth’s mother and Matt P, spoke a remarkable amount of French, which caused endless confusion for poor old me, who hadn’t spoken any, really, since high school. Had I thought about it, I might have tried to put a little more effort into ensuring that the grammar and spelling of what little French I’d put into the script was more correct.

There were only two fuck-ups worthy of note:

• After I’d hastily removed Rory’s (absent) character from the script, I’d neglected to add back to the dialogue an important point that he makes, early on: a fact about a particular door in the inn being creaky, which, combined with other information from the other characters, could be used to conclusively demonstrate the whereabouts of the murderer at the time of the murder.
• Worse yet, another part of the same evidence tree, to be delivered by Mrs. Marguerite Blubbery – played by Ruth – had also been broken by my sloppy last-minute editing. In her sourcebook, I’d given Ruth two conflicting pieces of information, and she’d opted to interpret the first one as being correct and the second one as being false.

In other words, fewer things “went wrong” than they have with a number of the professionally-made kits that we’ve bought over the years, which have, from time to time, had plotholes so big that youcould park a plane in them, or even mis-prints which have resulted in clues being revealed in the wrong order!

The guests point the Finger Of Blame at the murderer!

Nonetheless, a strong motive (to those who noticed it) and a weak alibi allowed about half the guests to correctly identify the murderer, which suggests to me that the mystery might have been slightly too easy (had I correctly implemented the two clues, above, everybody would probably have guessed). Still, it turned out okay as a result of my mistakes!

Unlike playing murder mystery “kits”, as we have before, having one of us write the story gave us the benefit that one of us – in this case, me – knew the entire plot from the start. I played a narrator/investigator role, therefore, similar to that played by audio CDs, DVDs, and paper-trail clues in many of the kits that we’ve used, and this actually turned out to work really well: I was able, for example, to keep the flow of conversation moving, to make sure that no crucial clues were completely missed, and to generally “host” the mystery part of the evening.

I’ve also learned a lot about how to write this kind of mystery, and I know what I’d do differently next time. In fact, I’ve already started work on a new mystery which I’m hoping we’ll be able to run late in January: Murder… In Space! Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

Finally: if you want to see all the photos I took on the night, here they are.

Yesterday, Claire and I broke up.

We’ve had several rough months, and several even rougher weeks, and this seemed to be the best solution to a variety of difficulties we’ve faced recently. It’s hard to answer the question as to whether the split could be described as mutual, but it can certainly be described as amicable, if that’s enough. If not, then perhaps it might help to understand that we’re both, little doubt, unhappy, but that it’s better to end things now in a friendly way than, say, in six months time in an unfriendly way.

I’m sure that neither of us want to go in depth into the issues behind this break-up in the public forum, but I’m sure that those of you who are our friends are more than welcome to ask privately, “what happened?” I apologise to everybody for whom this comes as a shock (i.e. most of you, from what I gather).

I’ve no doubt that Claire and I will continue to be close friends and will kick arse in all the fabulous ways that you’re used to, whether in one another’s company or apart. And I expect I speak for both of us when I say that there’s a slap on the wrist waiting for anybody we catch “taking sides”: there are no sides to be taken.

Virgil wrote that omnia vincit amor – love conquers all – but he was wrong. Despite our love for one another, if Claire and I had carried on the way we were, people would have ended up hurt. I’m feeling drained and miserable, but it’ll pass, and all will be well again. For a quarter of my life thus far I’ve been Claire’s, and she’s been mine, and through one another we’ve done so much. For the last seven and a half years I’ve been thankful for the great richness of experience that my relationship with Claire has brought. There will always be a special place in my heart for her.

Thanks for reading. I think I shall go and sit quietly for a while, now.

Edit @ 21:20 01-Nov-2009: Claire has a few things to say, too.

Can I be the first to say “Saw it a mile off!” (the giveaway was Sian “getting organised” by looking up people’s addresses).

Can I also be the first to say, at least via the digital interwebworknets: congratulations! You’ll get my RSVP very soon.

As those of you who use my Feed Proxy service to get your LiveJournal friends’ blogs (including friends-only posts) into Google Reader or a similar service know, the service hasn’t been working for the last few days.

I made all of the changes that LiveJournal’s bot policy required of me. I e-mailed them; no response. I e-mailed again; no response. I e-mailed to ask were they receiving my e-mails – yes, they were, but the person responsible for unblocking the bot “wasn’t in” at the moment.

I e-mailed again: yet again, no response.

I’ve been finding it harder to keep up with my LiveJournal friends because of this, and I know that a lot of you are pissed off, too. But it looks like LiveJournal aren’t going to be cooperative any time soon. So it’s time to switch services.

I’m moving my authenticated feeds over to FreeMyFeed. FreeMyFeed provides many of the same services at Feed Proxy did, although it also works for a wider variety of web applications (for example, you can also use it for Twitter, if you’re one of the dozen or so people who still uses Twitter).

If you’re already a Feed Proxy user:

Within the next few hours, each LiveJournal friend you’re subscribed to through Feed Proxy will produce a post explaining how you can convert their feed over to FreeMyFeed with about two clicks. I suggest that you mark that post as “read” and then click the link, and the rest of the work is mostly done for you. You’ll see some “read” posts all over again (boo!) and FreeMyFeed doesn’t convert LJ “moods” and “comment counts” for you automatically, but apart from that it should serve you well.

If you’re not using Feed Proxy or FreeMyFeed yet, or you’ve deleted your Feed Proxy-powered feeds from Google Reader:

Google Reader’s a great way to keep up-to-date with all your friends’ blogs – as well as with news, comics, and more – both in and out of LiveJournal. To subscribe to a LiveJournal blog in Google Reader or a similar service, friends-only posts and all, go to the FreeMyFeed website and enter into the boxes:

feed url: http://username.livejournal.com/data/rss?auth=digest
(replace username with the LiveJournal username of the person whose LiveJournal you’re subscribing to)

user: your LiveJournal username

pass: your LiveJournal password

Thanks for all of the support you LiveJournalers have given me over the years, both for Feed Proxy and for it’s predecessor, LiveJournal-To-Google Reader. It’s been fun.