Helmintholog

BR in efficiency miracle

Posted on March 7, 2003 by acb

There is now a a constantly updated virtual departure board for my station. Now all they need to do is fix the trains. But it is lovely to be a mouseclick away from the next train.

Posted in Travel notes | Comments Off

who is this man

Posted on March 7, 2003 by acb

and what is he smoking?

I only think I know the answer to the second question

Posted in Worms | Comments Off

The oddest gig of my professional life to date: I spent most of the day in the windowless basement of the Hilton Mews hotel in Mayfair helping to choose the books which will be introduced into the National Curriculum at some stage as examples of literary non-fiction. I talked too much, but some of it was sense. The other people — Andrew O’Hagan. Ian Jack, and Alan Taylor, a third Scots writer whom I had only heard of, never read, were hugely distinguished.

When I got out, I was standing on the steps of the Royal Academy, waiting for the Aztecs, when the phone rang. My dear sweet wonderful daughter had just won the school’s prize in a creative writing contest, which is really pretty wonderful, when I think that it was open to everyone, including the sixth form, and she is only twelve.

The Aztecs are every bit as gruesome as everyone says. But even the flint sacrificial knives cannot diminish my fatherly pride. I scuttled home quick as might be to congratulate her in person.

Posted in Literature | 1 Comment

Class warfare

Posted on March 5, 2003 by acb

The Daily Mail leads today with the news that the government has finally declared class warfare on the Middle classes: a delicious, blonde 18-year-old with three A-Level As, whose interests are world peace and nudism (oh all right, I made the last bit up) has been turned down for Bristol University because she went to a private school. Cue double-page spread of other photogenic young people who have failed to get into the university of their choice; cuel also the Wrath of Heffer. ( I won’t mention the fact that applying for Bristol when you might, on the face of it, get into Oxbridge, suggests you’re not going to benefit much from a university education.)

Continue reading →

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Improbable wealth

Posted on March 5, 2003 by acb

Three small items of financial news today. Someone made an offer onthe Japanese rights of the Worm Book. I accepted.

My friend Damian told me what he he’d got for three hours’ work writing about Rowan Williams for the Daily Mail last Wednesday afternoon. I’m not jealous, of course not. I have been paid the same rate by the same people. But it was almost exactly what the Japanese rights of the whole worm book fetched.

And I just found that someone on Amazon.com is selling a copy of my police book, written nearly twenty years ago, for $107.00.

Posted in Literature | 3 Comments

90 years of tech support

Posted on March 4, 2003 by acb

Two phone calls this morning: one from the mother of a mediaeval friend, for whom I had bought a laptop last February. I had set it up with Windows 2000 and two accounts, and Administrator one, and a User one for her, so she couldn’t screw anything up too badly. Somehow she had messed up the password for the User account, so I talked her through the business of logging on as an Administrator and resetting the user password. “I think I’ve done pretty well”, she said. “92 years old and I’m still teaching myself all this. Why are you laughing?” I was sharing her joy, I explained.

Then another friend rang on a wholly unrelated matter and mentioned in the middle of the conversation that his two-year-old son’s teletubbies CD wasn’t working any more. It was giving errors about being unable to read from Drive E:. What had you done wth it? I asked. “Well, Thomas hasn’t done anything with it. He just puts it in his toybox when it’s not in the CD tray.”

Have you noticed the real difference between mobile and landline calls today? In any landline call, it’s almost certain that the person at the other end will be fiddling with their computer as we talk, just as we are.

Posted in Software | Comments Off

about bloody time

Posted on March 3, 2003 by acb

There is a first cut of the book’s web page up here. I await comments with resignation. If you’re still using Netscape 4.7, it will probably look even worse. I suggest you upgrade to something more useful.

Posted in Worms | 8 Comments

Gibbon fix

Posted on March 3, 2003 by acb

Click here for some real writing.

Posted in Literature | Comments Off

(under)footnote to history

Posted on March 2, 2003 by acb

I’ve never seen the point of wasting my nice fresh morning mind listening to people tell lies on Radio Four, so I try to keep a worthwhile book for waking up to. At the moment, It’s Natasha’s Dance. From this I learnt the economics of serfdom in Russia. Because slave labour is almost always inefficient, by 1862, when the serfs were emancipated, then banks owned (or held mortgages on) 60% of the serf-owning estates, and 30% of the serfs. So they were freed on terms that meant they had to compensate their former owners, over a fifty-year period, for the loss of the land they were given. This money, of course, went to pay off all the mortgages. The newly emancipated peasants could then be hired,very cheaply, for much more profitable enterprises, by the richer landowners.

It’s very tempting to suppose that mankind has never lived in a more disgusting or expoloitative era than our own. But it’s not true.

Posted in Blather | Comments Off

getting it right

Posted on March 1, 2003 by acb

God knows I spend enough time whinging about OOo but just because of this I need to say that the beta of version 1.1 is a huge improvement. Everything seems to work about twice as fast as v1.0, especially loading and saving. Lots of little niggly bugs have been fixed. The database interface is beginning to make real sense. You can now, for example, drag and drop a query from the database window into a writer document and get the results all neatly tabulated there.