bookkeeping Saturday, 28 August 2010 link

I seem - and I don't think I'm alone in this - to have a stack of "items I'd like to own." There's always three or four things that I'd quite like to buy, sitting in the back of my mind. They're not things I actually need; if I did have a real, serious need for the item (new glasses, say) I'd just go out and get the damn thing. No, these are things that I'd just quite like. At any one time, there's about three or four. They may be useful items. They may be practical items. Or they may not. But I don't really need them - they're just something I'd quite like. These are the things that I occasionaly browse in internet shops. These are the things that I mentally picture myself with. These are not the things that I actually need for my day to day life. It's the mental list of "if a guilt-free grand drops in my lap, I'd buy this stuff".

So what? Aren't I just being a bit fucking protestant about this? If I want something, and we can afford it, why not just buy it? Treat yourself, you annoying puritan.

But experience has taught me that there isn't much point in actually buying items from this list. Yes, when I get one of these things it makes me happy. But the list doesn't go down for long. Within a month, I've seen something else that I quite fancy, and the whole cycle begins again. Items can easily stay on the list for years without any particular fuss. Since we're talking about idle wants, rather than needs, there's no particular problem keeping myself in a holding pattern on it. So I practice some basic self-discipline; I know there's no huge point into succumbing to the urge, so I don't.

Except.

Sometimes, there's a point where "want" becomes "need". And I hit one of those points the other day. For the past three or so years, I've had "pair of cherry red DMs" on my idle wants list. And then a month or two ago, we hit a sweet spot between actually needing a pair of new shoes and having someone fly out from the UK for a course I was helping teach. This meant that I could get a pair of original pattern cherry red DMs for somewhat under half the price in NZ, thus making it not merely sensible but positively frugal to buy the damn things.

So for the last month and a half, I've been breaking them in. I am amazed by how happy simply owning red footwear makes me. It is awesome; I have red boots, and the world is a cheerful place. Turns out having red footwear gets you respect both from people who remember the 90s fondly, and people born during them.

Of course, something else has bubbled up onto my idle wants list. But that's just the way it works.

When I were a lad, all this were fields. And I were a bit adventurous. And the consequence of that was that I broke my left arm repeatedly (either two or three times, depending on whether you count the time I rebroke it and had to have it reset a fortnight into the second break). It helped make me the balanced individual you see before you. And so it is with extreme sympathy, mixed with a certain amount of "good to see the younger generation getting out from in front of the TV" that I heard that my 8-year old brother has broken both his arms at the same time. Ouch.

For injury fans, I should also point out that I spent a fair bit of my youth in and out of hospitals with various injuries: I did something age 4 that put me in traction (no idea what), I broke my arm a fair bit as mentioned, I got hit by a car aged 16, and so on. This, coupled with the fact that my mother is a doctor and used to take me into work if I was off school sick, means that I find hospitals quite comforting places. The combination of harsh lighting, institutional decor, and pained monotony soothes me.

Work's been very busy recently. But a happy theme has been my old favourite, "it's astonishing what people will give you if you just ask them straight out for it."

Amusing stoush recently on Eye of the Fish about the greater Johnsonville area - confirming my suspicions that the Johnsonville Progressive Association need to calm the fuck down. Seriously: what are these people on? Followups: one, two.

  revisiting adolesence, with more stripes Monday, 2 August 2010 link

I was turned on to William Gibson in the late 80s, when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I lived in Tokyo at the time. Myself and a friend were sitting on a train - I think it was on the Hibiya-sen - and a group older gaijin got on. Looking back, they were probably only in their mid 20s, but at the time they seemed mature and knowledgeable. One of them saw that my mate was reading some weak-ass fantasy bullshit and enthusiastically recommended that we should give Gibson a go. Given Gibson's work, this random connection in a Tokyo subway always struck me as an extremely appropriate way to find out about him.

Which is a way of saying that I've been re-reading Gibson's early work. It's amazing how well it stands up; it's much less a creature of its time than many of the derivative works it inspired. I've just re-read both Neuromancer and Count Zero, and they're both still beautifully hallucinatory. It's easy to get lost in all the cyberdreck that Gibson inspired; too many authors concentrated on the badass badgirl cybernetic ninja aspects of the books, while forgetting that the work has a beautiful wide scope - one subplot in Count Zero is based entirely on art history, for instance. I hadn't re-read the books for ages, and revisiting them now, I'm picking up a lot more. Definitely worth revisiting.

That raises the question of re-reading favourite books. How often do you? I recall hearing that Alan Lee re-read the entire Lord of the Rings each year, and thinking this was an astonishing thing to do. I mean, who likes something that much? Many of my favourite books I don't really re-read that much simply because I know them so well. Yes, it's wonderful stuff, but jesus people: I've read it five times, it ain't getting any better. I'm going to wait a bit, let myself forget how good they are, then get all obsessed again in a couple of years when I pass them onto my kids, OK?

That said, about every three years I do re-read the entire works of H P Lovecraft. Because he's awesome. In fact, spurred by the word that GDT's next project is actually going to be the film version of At the Mountains of Madness he's been muttering about for ages, I actually picked up a copy of the only Lovecraft I hadn't already owned - At the Mountains of Madness, natch. It's the annotated Penguin Classics edition. I'd felt a bit guilty about paying money simply to own a physical copy of something that's arguably out of copyright and available in its entirety online, but S T Joshi's scholarly additions (including notes on the history and context of each story, and extensive endnotes within the text) really add value to the text. God help me, I've reached the point where I've started reading the endnotes in a work of fiction.

I've also become slightly obsessive recently about dazzle camoflage. If you've not heard of dazzle camoflage, here's a good backgrounder. For one thing, look at the photos of the HMS Argus and USS Leviathan on this page, then compare those to the outside and inside of my right arm. Now I'm tempted to use some of this stuff as inspiration for my left arm...

More examples of dazzle patterns, including prints available to order (personal favourite, from the Rhode Island School of Design.

  unexpected self-revelation Sunday, 25 July 2010 link

Today, Rebecca told me two things about myself that I hadn't realised:

• When I haven't heard something, I automatically reply "whatwhat?"
• "Daddy, I've never seen you cry."

The second one floored me. I slightly lamely replied "That's because I'm tough." What do you say in those circumstances? Maybe I'm more butch than I'd thought.

Other stuff: lost a tooth last week. Wisdom tooth, upper jaw - took about fifteen minutes. And most of that was waiting for the anesthetic to kick in. I was quite surprised by how straightforward and uncomplicated removing a tooth is. The actual removal took about two minutes. The removal was because it needed a filling, and the dentist said "Easier to remove it, and you'll never miss it." He's right, too.

Had the penultimate tattoo session on my legpiece the other day. I can once again confirm that having your inner thighs tattooed is remarkably painful, as is the back of the knee. Still, it's pretty much done; one final half-day session in a month or so to deepen the black in a few places, and we're golden.

Have recently been spending some time playing Echo Bazaar, a rather fun faux-Victoriana/horror/steampunk/cthulhoid game. You've got to like any game that has three choices when you create a character: male, female, and "how dare you ask, sir! That is entirely my own business!". Nice.

  seriously, it would be awesome Wednesday, 14 July 2010 link

So, a conservative commentator recently stated that ""Giving men sex without expecting any sort of commitment is training them to become predators." Now, am I the only person whose first thought was "... how awesome would that be?" Mind you, imagine the scene in bed:

"Now, honey, you need to put these on."
"Infrared vision goggles? Kinky!"

Actually, my first thought was "these people are clearly not having the same kind of sex I am"; but since the author of that post is also the person who thinks that homosexuality causes Nazism and that the holocaust was entirely run by gays, I think we can safely file them under 'working from a different set of basic assumptions about the world' and leave it at that.

A couple of brief snapshots:

• being rung while helping at a 5th birthday party to confirm my tattoo appointment for this week.
• cycling to work in a gale force headwind; rolling along the Old Hutt Road, under the trees, a pair of finches play aerial tag around me for about 100m before flying into the trees.
• riding home the same day, through lashing wind and rain, but with the wind behind me; soaked to the skin but grinning like a loon.
• the receptionist at work emailing around a link to King Missile's Cheesecake Truck song.
• discovering that coworkers all have nicknames based on the penguins from Madagascar. And, crucially, that Rico is a potplant.
• hitting the traffic lights just right, and timing my pace through them, so that I get through all four without having to put a foot on the ground.

At a previous employer, I once had a comment in a performance review: "Goal: work on professional demeanor in office", which I was told translated to "stop fucking swearing so much, you're worrying the Americans." In that spirit, I am remarkably happy to have found Fuck Yeah Profanity - which does what it says on the tin. Warning for the oblivious: it's really, really NSFW.

  it's educational Friday, 2 July 2010 link

...cyclists tend to be very happy while riding, and it's usually only after being nearly killed by drivers that they get angry. (Nearly being killed is irritating.) So, if Rainn Wilson (or anybody) keeps encountering angry cyclists, he may want to consider the possibility that he's actually a really bad driver, in the same way that a man who wonders why women "never have orgasms" might want to look instead to his own lack of sexual prowess.
Unfortunately, though, many people would prefer to keep driving poorly and instead consign cyclists to the park, in the same way that the man who can't please a woman might assert that the onus is on her to masturbate.

BikeSnobNYC

One of the funniest blogs around is the BikeSnobNYC. It's a bit in-jokey, but the guy can write, and he can do lovely takedowns like the one above. He also now has a book out, which I finished reading on Monday night. I can highly recommend it; if you're into cycling, it's awesome; if you're not, it's very amusing, and can help you understand why people might be into cycling. Very, very good fun; definitely someone who made that uncomfortable "successful blog/funny book" transition in grand style.

I am amused to find that there is a Poutine-bot on Twitter that retweets any mention of poutine. Tabarnac!

Both the kids are on a heavy Spongebob Squarepants kick at the moment. We don't mind. Partially because Spongebob is an incredibly good cartoon (seriously, it's hilarious), and partially because it's dramatically raised the level of discourse in the house. Now, when Maggie succeeds in some task, she yells "Victory is mine!" Similarly, "Curses! Foiled again!" and my personal favourite: "What was I thinking? I was out of control!"

  sifting through Monday, 14 June 2010 link

Another tattoo session on the 4th. Since the design is basically done, we jumped right in to the inking. Needles started at 10:30am, and by 4pm I was very much over it. We finished the interior fill of the tentacles, and got two of the tentacles shaded before I had to stop. Photos available on flickr; last session is booked in four weeks' time. A week later, most of the scabbing is off, and it's looking very crisp indeed. Nice the house

I drop Maggie off at creche in the mornings. She has some little friends who come over to say hi. One of them, A, is fascinated by the flesh tunnels in my ears (currently at 15mm, so very clear daylight through them). Every time I see her, she comes up and sticks her fingers through my ear and then asks me about them. It's very cute. Mind you, if you want to see happy, try dropping off a pile of reptile magazines (long story) in the middle of a group of 4-year old boys. "Crocodiles!" came the cry, and there was much happiness.

For various reasons, a moderate chunk of my childhood/adolescence was dropped off in my living room last week. I got to spend a happy evening looking through boxes of stuff that I'd liked enough to actually bother putting into boxes, but not enough to take with me a couple of moves ago. Half of it went in the rubbish, most of the rest went straight to St Vinny de Paul (they're more politically acceptable than the Salvos), and some serious memories were unearthed. There's a box under the house now, labelled "Star Wars Stuff". A more innocent age. That is, prior to Episode 1.

The other day I was cycling to work in swingeing wind and rain, thinking "Well, this sucks." I went around Balaena Bay and someone was going for a swim. There's always someone madder than you.

  ah, profanity, my old friend Tuesday, 1 June 2010 link

You didn't ask for it, so here it is: the Christian review of Avatar. Mostly, this is actually not too bad - obviously, I disagree with many of the basic strictures of the reviewer's worldview. But two things really annoyed me.

Firstly, he uses the word "dictums". Anyone who does this needs to be taken outside and given a good kicking. It combines pretension with ignorance (the plural of "dictum" is "dicta"). If you're going to be an ass, at least get it right.

Secondly, he says that the use of profanity in the movie "reveals a limited artistic ability to express frustration". I've seen this one a bit before, and it's always annoyed me. The assertion that swearing shows a lack of imagination. Frankly, I believe the key to communication is brevity. Simplicity. A common set of words. I like the goals of the Plain English campaign. And I have a large vocabulary; there are so many, many beautiful words in the world. But sometimes "fuck" is just the right one. Most of the time, actually. And I don't know about the rest of you, but when I drop something on my foot, I don't introspect and come out with a detailed imprecation comparing the current situation to an obscene classical Greek myth; I say "motherfucker!" in a loud voice and get on with things.

  i have a thing about chainline Sunday, 30 May 2010 link

And now, another digression into bike geekery.

Like most wheeled transport, bikes have gears. Gears control how much the rear wheel moves when you push the pedals around. Some bikes have a single, unchanging gear ratio; the BMX you had as a kid, or the fixie your overly trendy mates keep falling off, for example. So, for example, imagine a bike with a single chainring at the front with 42 teeth, and a single sprocket on the rear wheel with 21 teeth. For each turn of the pedals, the rear wheel goes around twice.

But most bikes you see these days have multiple gears. A typical set-up would be for three chainrings at the front, and nine or ten sprockets at the rear. Two derailleurs work to move the chain from ring to ring, or from sprocket to sprocket. So if you're riding on the flat, you can use the big ring at the front to give you high gears for speed. When you come to a hill, you can shift down to the middle or small rings to get a lower gear to help you climb.

Derailleurs aren't perfect, though. For one thing, you don't actually get as many gear ratios as you'd think. In the set of possible front ring/rear sprocket combinations, you get a fair bit of duplication. 32x16 is the same as 44x22, and 22x12, 32x17, and 44x22 are either identical or near as damnit. Plus, you want to avoid extreme chainlines - having the chain on your outermost ring but your innermost sprocket means that it's at an extreme angle, which wears the chain faster, is less mechanically efficient, and is pointless anyway (as you get basically the same gear by going for a more middle/middle effect). The result of all this is that on a nominally 27-speed gear system (3 chainrings, 9 sprockets) you end up with around fourteen or fifteen usable gears.

Plus, derailleur systems are a pain to keep maintained. The mechanism is hanging there, out in the open, so gets a lot of problems from dust, grit, water, and road muck. Offroad, derailleurs are pretty vulnerable to sudden impacts (cough cough). It's quite easy for the settings to get slightly off, so that the gear runs noisily in some gears or jumps between sprockets. And the need for chains to be able to flex laterally to move to different sprockets means that the chains are weaker than chains designed not to flex.

So why are derailleurs used on the overwhelming majority of production bicycles? Well, they're (relatively) cheap, they're maintainable when they go wrong, the gear change is extremely fast, when maintained in mint condition they're more mechanically efficient, and - crucially - they're reasonably light. They're perfect for racing bikes, which get a lot of mechanical attention anyway. They're also very customisable - you can change the gear ratios easily by changing the set of sprockets on the rear wheel. It's straightforward to set up derailleur gears so you get a gear pattern you like. The main problems with derailleurs show up if you use them day in, day out. Derailleurs make a hell of a lot of sense if you're racing, but less so if you're thrashing a bike day in, day out.

The main alternative to derailleurs if you want to actually be able to shift gears (which not everyone does) is a hub gear. This holds the gear mechanism inside the hub of the rear wheel, and changes how fast the rear wheel rotates relative to the pull of the chain. Hub gears were very popular in the 50s through 70s; the name Sturmey-Archer may stir memories of old 3-speed Raleigh Choppers. 3-speed is how most people experienced hub gears; in the 70s, one of the reasons that 10-speed derailleur bikes were so popular was that the alternative hub gear available was the 3-speed. There, it made sense to prefer the derailleur - a 10-speed system usually gave you around 7 usable gears, and a greater range of gears (that is, higher top gear, lower bottom gear).

But times have moved on.

And hub gears are slowly making a bit of a comeback, particularly for the kind of bikes you just want to ride without having to worry too much about maintenance. Somewhere in their lineup, most manufacturers will have one or two hub geared bikes - usually around the "city/comfort" end of things.

Whereas in the 70s, you were looking at a 3-speed hub gear - maybe a 5-speed if you pushed the boat out and bought top of the line - these days a 7 or 8-speed is relatively affordable. The current standard Shimano Alfine has eight gears, over a 300% gear range (that is, the top gear is three times the size of the bottom one). That's better than the old models, but it's still not quite up to derailleur standard. A standard 9-speed mountain bike gear has about a 400% range, for contrast.

But that's not impossible. The gold standard of hub gears has, for the last decade or so, been the Rohloff speedhub. 14 (unique) gears, 500% gear ratio, incredible precision German engineering. That's up there with top end derailleur gears, though it's slightly heavier. What's the catch? The price. An aftermarket Rohloff will set you back around UKP1,000 (NZ$2000) just for the hub. That's considerably more than most whole bicycles.

So for the last five years I've been slowly getting more and more fed up with mechanical shortcomings and fussiness of derailleurs. And I've been looking wistfully at a Rohloff-equipped bike (I once saw one parked on Lambton Quay; I nearly licked it). But I've been sensible. And I've been slowly thinking, maybe I should get a bike with an 8-speed hub gear as a day-to-day commuter - something I can ride through shite winter weather without having to worry about what it's doing to my gears.

And then I found out that Shimano is releasing an 11-speed version of their Alfine hub gear, with a gear ratio of 409%. It's relatively light, and seems to be up to pretty high performance. It looks pointlessly crisp, and hits the market in September. I think you'll definitely be seeing quite a few of these starting to creep into the more performance-orientated ends of manufacturers lineups.

So it would seem that a high-performance hub gear was becoming achievable without breaking the bank. I started mentally specc'ing my "realistic ultimate commuter" - road or cyclocross bike frame, running disk brakes for decent stopping power in the wet, with an 11-speed Alfine hub gear on the back. I even started checking out frames, in a daydreamy kind of way. And then I got an email from On One, informing me that they were about to start producing a disk-compatible version of their legendary "Il Pompino" road frame, and shipping it with disk brakes and the current 8-speed Alfine hub gear - specifically as an "ultimate commuter" build. And from asking them, they're going to offer an 11-speed version when the upgraded one becomes available.

So now I know what I want for Christmas.

  yes, i know these are getting repetitive Wednesday, 5 May 2010 link

Your first tattoo is a huge deal. You are going to be maimed, and bleed, and marked for life. You will never look the same again. It will hurt. It's gigantic.

I remember my first tattoo. It was back in 1994, from memory; my flatmate at the time (Maire) and I went into the small storefront on upper Cuba St (it's an antique shop now) that Shane Gallagher had set up as a studio. We'd made the mistake of telling a couple of friends that we were going to get inked, and they'd turned up to support us. For the values of "support" that include making jokes about needles. Maire very firmly went first, while I made small talk and tried to stop people making the aforementioned jokes, getting more and more nervous as time went on. Then it was my turn. The design I chose was a freehand (that is, custom drawn on and then inked in) anklet on my right leg, influenced by some of the spikier flash on offer on the walls. Though to be honest, like most people getting their first tattoo it wasn't so much that I wanted that particular pattern, it was that I wanted to be the kind of person who had a tattoo. I left the outside of my ankle unfinished (it still is) because I ran out of ideas. Afterwards, we all went off to a cafe, bleeding slightly and swearing we had the most awesome endorphin highs. For the next few weeks, I kept rolling my trouser legs up so as to show off the new tattoo. It was, as first tattoos should be, a great big occasion and a tremendous deal for me.

After a while, though, it becomes familiarised by repetition. It still hurts. You're still going to be marked for life. But after a while, the days all start to blur together a bit. It's just another day at the office. It's another day where you have to break off at 5 o'clock to go get the kids.

So I had another session on my leg yesterday. And since I'm sure that these posts are blurring together a bit for everyone, I'll just say that we spent 4 1/2 hours designing the tentacles for the octopus that's now taking up most of my left leg, then another 2 1/2 hours actually inking the outlining on. I can confirm that having the back of your knee tattooed is extremely painful, but that it's nothing as compared to having your inner thighs tattooed. Absolute agony. Now we've got all the outlining done; next session is filling in the linework areas in the design, then shading. A fair bit to go yet. But now that the tentacles are on in outline, it's very unmistakeably an octopus, rather than a lozenge-shaped abstract design - the concept of "it's an octopus, but we haven't got around to putting legs on it yet" is not one that leaps immediately to the average observer's mind. Next session in four weeks.

One fun thing about the design is that I need to have my trousers more or less off for you to see the whole thing, as the head comes up right onto my hip and one of the tentacles is quite high up my inner thigh. In shorts, you should be able to see some of the body and about four or five tentacles. I'm quite happy with having a design that's mostly concealed most of the time. Adds a touch of mystery, innit.

Actually, I went into mild shock yesterday evening after getting home. Interesting, but not much fun. Next time I'll need to be a bit more careful about keeping my blood sugar up after the session; severe nausea two hours later was not something I want to repeat.

Times have definitely changed. Not only do my tattooists text to confirm appointments, they've got a page on Facebook. Pacific Tattoo's page is here; they also advised me to check out the page for Monk3ys up in Auckland. Monk3ys is run by Cory Weir, who spent over a decade working in Japan (working with the Life Under Zen crew). Looking at his work, it's definitely the sort of Pacifica that I really like; might be worth popping in next time we're up with the in-laws in Auckland.

  a 29er you say Tuesday, 27 April 2010 link

So the city council is going to make the southbound lane of Thorndon Quay a no-stopping zone up until 9am. This is a very good thing. Thorndon Quay is really rather pointlessly dangerous, as cyclists filter up the wide margin beside the slow rush hour traffic and drivers swing across to park up. This won't actually eliminate the danger down there - about half the danger comes from drivers driving into businesses or internal carparks - but it'll help reduce it. Now, if they could only do something to make people look out for cyclists when they pull out of the driveways along the Old Hutt Road in Kaiwharawhara.

Longtime readers here may recall some of my earliest updates being amusing-in-retrospect rants about our neighbour in Cambridge during late 2000 through to around 2002. Quick precis: she was precisely what conservatives have in mind when they talk about people on the DPB (council housing/welfare queens etc). Six children, to six different fathers, many of whom had been taken away from her by social services at various points. Functionally illiterate. Lived on benefits, supplemented with shoplifting and low grade fraud (at one point, Heather was a prosecution witness when this woman was charged with fraud). Claimed that her kids got a hard time because they were half black, while ranting about the "fucking Pakis" running the corner shop. Frequently drunk and abusive. Her three year-old son was frequently found by the police wandering around the housing estate on his own at 11pm. Her primary method of contraception seemed to be incarceration - her kids coincided with the stretches that she wasn't in prison for some petty crime or another. When she was finally evicted by the council, she was once again pregant (rumour was, to one of the local 15-year olds who hung around trying to cop off with her eldest daughter) and did a runner, leaving her house so trashed the council had to totally gut it and rebuild. A complete poster child for everything the right wing thinks is wrong with welfare.

And that's why I'm left wing, and think the social safety net is a good thing. Because yes, you do get abuse of the system. There will always be worst cases. But, realistically, what else was my neighbour going to do? Without housing, without income support, she'd have been in an even worse state. She'd have been on the street, begging or stealing. As it was, she was a huge, massive, collossal pain in the arse - but without the social safety net she'd have been completely screwed. And I'd rather live somewhere where the occasional idiot can rort the system than somewhere that leaves people out on the streets.