Obscureness

So I have just foud the obscure store. Collections of bizarre stories from around the world including the one about the man who cut off his own hand in the local supermarket and then ran around screaming 'I'm not a terrorist' or the one about the Council woman who found a horse's head in her swimming pool and the zombie dance troupe arrested for carrying weapons of mass destruction. You can't make this stuff up.

Phone dump IV

More random, and in this case, sometimes badly taken photos from my camera over the past month or so with appropriate commentary.

The condemned man approximately 12 hours before the big day. Bng looks pretty relaxed actually.

My 'mug of curry' and my stick arms looking very tanned if I do say so myself.

London, after around four free pints of beer on the boat party I got to go to this week. I know the photo is blurry but this is what it actually looked like fore me too at the time.

Newquay. And a fun advert.

My new sofa. You can see it is still in the store as I haven't bought it yet (still).

My old office.

Haha, nice porch, what made you think that was a good idea?

The African mask my parents bought for me when they were in South Africa last year. This photo was taken around five minutes before it got stuck in the bin beacuse it had wood worm. You can just make out some of the holes in the black stripe bit and dust marks on the lower brownish area. I was a bit cross about this as I rather liked it, oh well.

Clicky clicky

Where will you click?

Mongol Rally

So yesterday I went to see the launch of the Mongol Rally, an 8000 mile treck from London to Ulan Bator in Mongolia. With the twist being that you can't go in a car with an engine size in excess of 1 litre and should generally considered to be a bit crap. Here are some photos.







It was pretty fun as a bunch of crap cars lurched, hooting and spluttering, onto Park Lane causing traffic chaos.

And look, there's a whole bunch of other fun slash stupid quasi-organised adventures you can do too.

Heat Vision and Jack

I've been trying for months to find a copy of this (I should have known it would have been on YouTube). It stars Jack Black as the most intelligent man in the world and he goes around solving crimes on his talking motorbike which has the personality of his dead room mate. I can't believe they didn't make this into a full series (via). More info.

+1 afternoon

I went to lunch at work today not because I was hungry but because the fire alarm went off. When I got back from lunch the building was closed up and the power was out. And then everyone got sent home.

So we went down the pub.

Brilliant, there could not be a more fun time for the office to be closed down than on a Friday lunch time. And everyone was totally buzzing with having been given a free afternoon.

Rogue hole

A couple of weeks ago this hole appeared in the road outside my flat about 50 centimetres in width. Initially when I noticed it I ignored it as a normal hole in the road kind of thing. However a few days later as I was walking home from work I saw some kid regarding this hole and he stuck his leg in it. Not just his foot and part of his leg but his entire leg up to his thigh. This really gave me major flashbacks to Stephen Kings It when the kid sticks his arm down the drain and the scary clown thing grabs him and pulls him in.

Anyway I went over for a closer look and this hole was way deep. Seriously I couldn’t see the bottom. The thing is too that there were no paint markings round the hole or any warnings about it like you would expect with road works etc. especially when it is something quite so deep. It appeared randomly one day without any build up having previously been an unremarkable chunk of hardstanding.

Recently a metal plate and four funny little cones have appeared on and around it as if the Council has noticed it and decided it might be a nice idea eventually to do something about it.


Thing is, how did this hole get there? It wasn’t previously a patched up bit of road, just a normal bit of hardstanding which was actually in a decent condition. But now it has this funny narrow but super deep hole in it. So I am thinking how could it have got there and the only conclusion I could draw that it might have been a meteorite hit. Seriously how else could you account for a narrow but super deep rogue hole?

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is where people like stuff because it has human traits. If you think about it we apply anthropomorphism to a huge amount of things on all kinds of levels and we do it on a massive scale, often almost completely unconsciously.

We like fluffy bunnies and kittens because they have characteristics and features and behaviours which we can relate to like having a nose, eyes, a mouth and ears whereas insects and fish don’t receive the same treatment because they lack these characteristics.

And then we apply this to stuff we make too. Things like C3PO who has arms, legs, eyes, nose, mouth and ears. But he clearly isn’t human because he’s made of metal and painted gold.

And then we also apply this kind of thing to inanimate objects. One of my favourites is Eat Me dates. Ok, so its just a box with dates in it. But it has ‘eat me’ written on the front. The package is expressing to you that it is good to be eaten. What a bizarre thing to express. ‘Hi, I’m Nick, you should consume me because I taste yummy.’

Anyway, I came across the uncanny valley a while ago. This is chart that shows how amenable people are to things which have anthropomorphic tendencies. With things that have human traits but are clearly not human being delivering a positive emotional response and things that are very human also delivering a positive emotional response.

But then stuff that looks very nearly human but isn’t quite human delivers a negative emotional response. The uncanny valley. As illustrated in this graph which I stole off Wikipedia.

And its spot on. Think about it, things that we don’t like but have anthropomorphic tendencies deliver a negative emotional response. Things like, zombies, Darth Maul and (my particular favourite) the Sun Maid raisin lady.

Further reading.

Digger

Dig, dig, dig, dig. Fun little flash game I have been playing since, erm... half past six.

Hot desking

So two weeks ago I/we moved offices to our new ‘flexible working’ environment. Basically hot desking (albeit in rather smart new climate controlled offices).

I will admit that I was pretty nervous about how this was going to work and really feared that the whole thing would be nothing short of an abject disaster of unmitigated chaos and social strife.

However, whilst there have been some teething issues, for the most part I would class the whole thing as a broad success. It’s been funny watching and learning as people come in, pick a desk (a new one almost each day for me) and get on with work.

Mostly people sit with people they know and like or even don’t know but think they will like and then subtle shifts as other people who people generally don’t so much like the idea of move in and then move away or other people slowly gravitate to other areas. And a general theme seems to have developed of randomly having lunch with whoever you seem to have sat with, far too often in some nice café for longer than strictly necessary.

I know feedback from individuals who have been the sole hot-desker in an office has been relatively negative but when everyone is doing it, it seems to work really well and creates this hive of social frenzy and networking. Of course none of this is helping this situation.

And after only two weeks of this new arrangement I can’t imagine going back to having an assigned desk. I mean seriously, how dull is that? Wouldn’t you rather come in and choose to sit next to the hot girl in the office, or at the desk with the window seat, or at the desk which faces away from a close wall so you can surf the internet with impunity?

Ok, so there are drawbacks of having to unpack all your stuff onto your desk in the morning and clear your desk at the end of everyday but it keeps things tidy and enforces self organisation. And at it makes a pedestrian day at the office a little bit more fun.

Omg what is this atrocity

This, by a wide margin, is one of the most terrifyingly awful things I have ever seen.

Quick change

Uh, how do they do that?



And what's Piers Morgan doing there?

Want to feel small?

So this is you represented as a pixel in comparison to the population of the planet. And that planet is very small compared to some other stuff in the solar system and then you could fit the entire solar system into Antares.

Work/life

As you probably know I moved jobs earlier this year. The job I started was not the one I expected to be doing. As opposed to having a senior level, hands on position of dealing with major projects I have ended up in a quasi-team leader role, coordinating a variety of people on a large volume of minor projects.

This was not the job I signed up for but for some reason I seem to have ended up doing it.

Had I been told this is what I would be doing when I took the job I probably wouldn’t have taken it in the first place. However, I did and this is the situation I am now in and I am not too sure what to do about it.

On one hand I have a job I can do with my eyes closed, have a comfortable salary, pleasant commuting arrangements, a few interesting projects, flexible working and nice people to work with. Thing is I don’t find what I do particularly engaging. I know that at one time I found what I did at work engaging and have been struggling for a while to grasp at that again. Basically my current job supports, facilitates and indeed even forms part of a lifestyle I enjoy. However, career wise I don’t think it is taking me anywhere.

I can solve this quite easily by causing a fuss about my present position where I am at the moment or just ditching them for another employer (there are benefits of being in a massively undersubscribed professional field). However I don’t know if I should.

At the moment I am quite content. I turn up to work, complete some tasks, some interesting, some mundane, often have lunch at a café or restaurant, do some more work in the afternoon and then disappear off home at an entirely reasonable time with a mild buzz at having spent the day flirting with a selection of girls and feeling like the whole event was some kind of quasi-social, quasi-functional, quasi-academic exercise.

And that’s fine. But it’s not what I wanted when I applied for the job. I don’t know if it’s what I want now (well, except for the flirting thing which is cool).

I think my present job is a bit of an unintended dead end. But it’s a really comfortable dead end. Kind of like a cul-de-sac of air conditioned executive houses in the American mid-west. I don’t know if I should sit back and pull out my recliner of inane contentment or get out the Mustang and leave as fast as I possibly can in a smoke of rebellion against my comfortable existence.

Pyongyang effect

In case you didn't guess from this post, North Korea scares me a little. Especially now they are throwing missiles around.

Anyway, in a topical veign here's a nice website with all kinds of freaky photos of North Korea being generically scary (via).

The wedding

This weekend I had the honour of attending the wedding of my close friends Kate and Andrew or K8 and Bng as the internet would have you believe they are called. The whole day was excellent and brilliantly choreographed by all involved from the initial ceremony to the wedding breakfast, cutting the cake, the evening ceilidh and then slightly drunken deconstruction of the evening festivities.

Now a wedding is always going to be a great thing but this one had particular resonance for me as K8 and Bng are particularly close friends who I met at University some eight years ago now.

I met them both, as they met me, at around about the same time in my first year at University and followed their blossoming relationship from the very start when they ‘hooked up’ in the first year and went from then on. I have had the pleasure of living with both of them in several different places whilst I was at University and we got up to all kinds of activities including what I consider to be the singularly finest moment of taking our fourth year flat to red alert.

Anyway, so it was an absolute delight when I found out they were engaged and the wedding this weekend was pretty emotive for me and I know for a lot of other people too. I admit that I did nearly cry during the wedding ceremony but managed to control myself because of course guys don’t do that sort of thing.

So my congratulations to both Kate and Andrew on their wedding. I wish you all the best together.

So that you get the gist of what was going on here are a couple of photos from my cameraphone, not in the order of the highest quality of the photos taken that day by any stretch but I thought it would be nice to add a record on the blog.

Arrival of the bride.

Exchange of rings.

Signing the register.

The first dance.

A slightly later dance.

On the Tube

If you are anything like me you can probably get to pretty much any destination in London without too much trouble on the Tube. Thanks in no part to the brilliantly conceived Tube map, the construction of which is so delightfully easy to read.

I can count on one hand the number of times I have driven into London partly because of traffic and parking issues but also because the Tube map makes it so easy to work out where I am going and how to get there.

However, years and years of doing this has left me with a massively distorted image of how big central London actually is. I mean it’s big, don’t get me wrong but it’s not as huge as the Tube map makes it look.

It’s only been fairly recently that I have learnt that you don’t have to use the Tube to get around London. You can walk around too and all those individual attractions I have been going to and insisting on going into the nearest Tube station you can actually walk between. Stuff like walking between Leicester Square and Oxford Street or Covent Garden to Soho or Baker Street to Marylebone.

That’s why I really liked the Tube Journey Planner which really doesn’t plan your journey but just shows the Tube map overlaid on a regular map of London.

It’s just a shame they can’t add all those other extra bits of information like the Circle Line being the slowest train line in the world ever, the Northern Line being the most crowded and uncomfortable and the southern section of the Jubilee Line being the smoothest.

The girl

So it looks like the Girl is publishing a book. I wonder if I could get away with reading that on the train? Its not exactly got the most discrete cover. Of course the chance that I could actaully bump in to the author (Londoner) (although invariably not know) whilst reading makes it all the more interesting.

New sofa

After four years of having either a 'temporary sofa' (recently depsoited in the local tip) or having no sofa at all I think I have settled on getting this one.

There is only one draw back. It either fits but doesn't face the tv or it fits and faces the tv but I don't have a dining table, which rather essentially also supports my computer monitor.

So erm... I am going to Homebase now to get a decent tape measure so I can make a plan of my living room and do some lateral thinking.

Who sits next to you?

So I have been doing this commuting into London on the train thing for about three months now. Various things have struck me and I have got used to them over the time I have been using public transport. When I first started doing it the noise from other people, the train announcing tanoy-robot-lady (I can now recount every single train announcement) and the hassle of having to put up with everyone else really irritated me but I have got used to all that and kinda switch off to it.

However as time has gone on one particular thing has started to catch my interest more. Where people sit or, more specifically, who other people sit next to. Now obviously I am principally thinking of who sits next to me.

In the morning the train gets way crowded. At Maidenhead I always get a seat to myself because it is one of the first stops. However by the time it gets to Southall sometimes there is not room on the train for some folks there to actually get on (usually accompanied by banging on the windows and shouts of move down the isle). Anyway I usually have someone sitting next to me by Langley or West Drayton.

This is where it gets a bit odd.

This is totally unscientific but I would guess that by the time I get off the train at Ealing Broadway the demographics of the train population are around about 60% white, 30% Indian-Asian (although this is massively skewed by the Southall effect) and the remaining 10% being oriental or black. It’s around a 50:50 male to female ratio. The boarding of the various different ethnic origins is generally pretty consistent in terms of where they get on too with the exception of Southall (which is very busy and pretty much 100% Indian-Asian) So it’s a wide mix.

However, around about two to three days a week I end up having an oriental girl sitting next to me. And not the same one either, lots of different oriental girls, although I think a few times the same girl has sat next to me (but I am not sure as I usually stick my head in my book and keep it there). Now given the train demographics the chances of this happening at random so often are pretty slim. I mean like generally there is only one oriental girl per section of the train I am in and they are almost always sitting next to me. Furthermore, white guys never sit next to me but girls of all races do and Asian, black and oriental guys do.

So why do I end up with oriental girls next to me so often? When I get on the train on the way home I generally stand until a pair of seats become available that I can have to myself but if I had to pick someone to sit next to I would apply three tests as to whether I would sit next to them; in this order:

1. Is the person in question a hot girl? If so I would sit next to them.
2. Does the person look clean, quiet, normal, not fat and unlikely to invade my personal space. If so I would sit next to them.
3. Does the person look like they are going to get off at the next stop. If so I might sit next to them but probably wouldn't because that kind of thing is really difficult to thin-slice.

If neither of these options are available I would stand. So running my own thought processes on the oriental girls I must either look hot to oriental girls or look clean, quiet, normal, not fat and unlikely to invade personal space. Neither of which I consider to be bad things. But I really don’t know if this is their motivation. Perhaps my fellow passengers are all more unappealing to sit next to than me for other reasons. Perhaps, like me, oriental girls favour the south side of the train (for the morning sun) and forward travelling airline style seats like I do (but I would be surprised if many people had thought about train seating positions quite as much as I have).

My ego isn’t sufficiently big (but it’s a close thing) so as to be convinced that all oriental girls think I am hot. Nevertheless I can’t think of any other reasonably explicable reason why this situation occurs so often.

Regardless, the oriental girl sitting next to me phenomenon is not so objectionable. They are almost always quiet and don't invade my personal space which is about as good as I can reasonably ask of a seating partner.