March 2006 – Page 2 – a sibilant intake of breath

A farewell to spheres of tungsten carbide

When I saw fountain pens on sale for the price of a pint at Smiths, I decided it was time to try and improve the elegance of my correspondence. It was with some success that I made my initial foray into the world of non-ballpoint pens: writing a thank-you note to Sarah’s parents and a short letter to Meghan. My printing is more geared towards being able to copy extensive notes during a lecture than producing perfectly formed letters, but it would be nice to be able to do the latter, when the necessity arises.

One unexpected aspect of fountain pen use if that it feels better to write. No pressure is required in order to deposit ink, so there is a feeling that the pen is just gliding across paper. While you might expect that to lead to many errors, even my earliest experiments are at least as legible, on average, as my ballpoint printing. Taken up with the novelty of a new type of writing instrument, as well as the familiarity of writing to friends, I wrote short letters to Viktoria Prokhorova, Meaghan Beattie, and Kate Dillon. There is something exceptionally satisfying both about writing and receiving handwritten letters. Regardless of the level of care or energy you put into an email, it doesn’t usually manage to have the same significance.

Four weeks of break remain

My mother arrives in the UK tomorrow, and is coming to Oxford on Thursday. On Saturday, we are leaving for Malta, where we will remain until the 1st of April. After that, there will be nineteen days remaining before the qualifying test, during which I also need to do thesis preparation. On the 10th, with automotive support from Kai, I will be moving out of Wadham College and into the flat on Church Walk where I will live until September. By the 15th of April, I mean to have submitted an edited version of the fish paper to another journal. I don’t revel in the work that is upcoming, but I am definitely looking forward to the Maltese trip.

I opened up the fish paper the other day. It seems an eternity since I wrote it. I don’t remember the details of the sources, and I certainly don’t have them on hand. The extent of rejigging that is possible is probably limited to summarizing the more tedious or esoteric segments and focusing on a single aspect of the argument. I don’t think it will be necessary to reformat the footnotes, at this stage, which is a blessing since this is a pre-EndNote document.

It had been far too long since I had seen Margaret, prior to meeting with her for a while this morning. Of all the M.Phil programs I know people in, the economics program seems to be the most work. Constant worksheets and math seem calculated to drive them to depression or madness. Kudos to Margaret for enduring thus far.

iPod voyages

The iPod seems to have benefitted from its trip to the Netherlands, even though they decided there was nothing wrong with it and sent it straight back. More precisely, they decided they among “issues reported concerning [my] iPod” “were found to be within Apple’s specifications for acceptable performance, usability and/or functionality.” I guess crashing several times an hour isn’t serious enough to warrant repair.

I am considering making V for Vendetta the first film I see in theatres in the UK. Has anyone seen it? If so, comments on it would be appreciated. I’ve had the comics recommended several times, but they aren’t in any of the Oxford libraries and cost about twenty Pounds in bookshops.
For Neko Case fans, her new song “Hold On, Hold On” strikes me as very good. It has the same combination of a solid melody and innovative lyrics as the rest of her better work.
Congratulations to Meaghan Beattie for winning top speaker at the French Debating Nationals.

Sarah’s wedding

The whole experience surrounding Sarah’s wedding has been a valuable and enjoyable one. It was a pleasure to have the chance to witness her and Peter getting married. My thanks to them both for inviting me, as well as to Sarah’s parents for their extensive hospitality. I wish Peter and Sarah the most enriching, prosperous, and enjoyable of future lives together.

I arrived in Chichester on Saturday more than three hours before the service began. It had been my intention to ensure that – even if I missed a train or something else went wrong – I will still get to the wedding on time. The early arrival gave me the chance to explore the city a bit, as well as have my suit dry-cleaned, as seemed appropriate. As everyone who attended will surely recall, the day was as cold as it was brilliantly sunny, especially after we emerged from the church for the reception. By the time the professional group photos were being taken, the sunlight had a lovely golden hue that seemed to suit the occassion.

The service was held at St. Richard’s Church and was markedly more religious than the only other wedding I’ve attended. There was a good deal of prayer, Bible reading, and the singing of hymns. I particularly enjoyed those, despite how I had never heard any of them before. Attending the ceremony was a surprisingly moving event. While I had always recognized its significance, I didn’t anticipate the extent that it would affect me personally. The subsequent reception included good food, good wine, entertaining speeches, and a celtic band that played rather more songs that I recognized than were included in the service. It was nice to meet some of Sarah’s other friends, as well as her husband’s.

I’ve known Sarah for five years now, since we were students together at the University of British Columbia. She was starting her master’s degree at the time, and I was in my first year as an undergraduate. Since then, I have come to very much value and appreciate her friendship, as well as the correspondence we have exchanged. Hopefully, freed of the burdens of wedding planning, she and Peter will have the chance to come visit me in Oxford at some point soon after they return from their preliminary honeymoon in Menorca. Sarah should be finishing her doctorate (making her and her husand into Dr. and Dr. Webster) around the same time as I will be completing my M.Phil. I hope that I will get a few chances to see them both over that period, after which I have no real idea of where in the world I will be.

Arundel

After spending the night at Sarah’s parents’ house, her father suggested that, instead of spending a few hours in Chichester before my train, he drop me off in Arundel. Very hospitably, he showed me a number of interesting places within what seems to be both a beautiful and quite historic area, and even picked me up to drive me to Chichester in time for my return to Oxford. The day was enormously better spent than it would have been in some coffee shop in Chichester, and I got a chance to get to know Sarah’s father a bit. The wedding was a reminder of how little I know her friends and family.

Arundel itself is quite a stunning place. A river runs past the town and, by following its winding and rush-lined banks, you can get a sweeping exposure to the countryside that ends at a pub called the Black Rabbit, where I had lunch. Additionally, the streets of the town itself are worth exploring: particularly since they contain a number of top-notch outdoor equipment stores. While it was surprising to find them there, it was a nice reminder of Vancouver and the wonders of Mountain Equipment Co-Op.

Both during the reception and in Arundel, where I happened to run into them, I spoke with several members of Sarah’s extended family who live in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. I remember Sarah visiting them fairly frequently while she was in Vancouver, but I never met them during that period. I expect that their exceptionally photogenic daughter is on several hundred memory cards by now.

Unfortunately, the whole weekend was relatively unsuccessful photographically. I didn’t want to make myself obtrusive during the wedding and reception – which were both professionally photographed anyhow – and the tendency of the A510 to blow out highlights is annoyingly and frequently manifest in the outdoor photos I took. Several people have already indicate that they will send me some of their photos, which will hopefully turn out better than mine did.

Off to Chichester

Let it be known, far and wide, that 5:45am is a beast of a time, and something I would not lightly wish upon others. On Sunday, I will let you know of how the trip went.

Nervous, trundling day

On the basis of a highly scientific and statistically valid one-night, one-person study, I wake up feeling much more rested when I sleep with earplugs. I also dream about getting attacked by a huge scruffy black house cat in the woods beside Capilano River.

I spent several hours today in the Oxford Country Library, near Nuffield, reading Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary. As you would expect, it’s a fairly ugly book. The kind of thing that stays funny when it’s in the realm of absurd abstraction, yet is always still tinged with the certainly of loss and failure. It’s nice, at least, to just pick up a book and read it, without major pause. You would need to be superhuman to do it with an environmental politics book, but for a 400 page pseudo-autobiographical novel, the pattern fits. Reading Thompson is like taking insurance against the possibility that you’re a hub in the machine that he seems to understand and mostly exist outside of. The danger is that you might see your loneliness reflected in his own.

All told, it’s not the greatest book, and it certainly doesn’t add a lustre to your day. At the same time, Thompson wrote it when he was my age and there is a sense in which you can see the future laid out in it: his future, in particular. You see that in what may be the most notable phrase:

It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.

Your classic “narrator arrives in a place, things go wrong, he leaves” story, it reminds me of a lot of contemporary fiction. It’s the anti-journey story, where there is no clear end and even the process of travel collapses upon itself.

Spending time in the public library reminded me of one of the great truths of travel. Almost everything about your experience in a city is determined by how many doors you can open, or have opened for you. If all you can muster is the automatic doors at the entrances of libraries and shopping malls, you’re in a pretty bad way. The idea was reinforced as I took a quick walk around the long pool in Nuffield – perhaps my favourite quad in Oxford – and contemplated with appreciation the benefits of position and connection.

Oxford is peppered today with people in green, with top hats and Leprechaun boots. Were it not for my very early morning rise tomorrow, and the importance of being awake and aware subsequently, I might make a foray to see how this de-Christianized celebration of a saint takes place here. I was nervous, at first, to see people walking around with this kind of regalia – images of football related violence and painted fans flickering in my imagination – but when I saw that it was mostly people under fifteen or over thirty-five, my mind was largely put at ease.

I suppose I should spend tonight getting a start on the new Economist, making sure I have a clean shirt, and checking that I can remember how to tie a tie.

Cognitive calculus

Speaking with Lindi tonight, I was reminded of an idea that I wanted to briefly describe. Basically, it’s that it can be useful to think about self-expression in terms of time ratios. That is to say, the ratio between the amount of time it takes for someone to take in your thoughts, as a function of how useful they find those thoughts to be.

If, in a seminar of fifteen, you can make a comment that takes one minute, the effective cost to the group is fifteen minutes. As such, it had better be worth at least fifteen minutes of thinking time, based on the value of thinking time for members of that group. A comment that nobody would have come up with on their own is especially valuable precisely because it represents such an efficient use of time.

Something similar is true of blogging. If I can spend an hour to produce something that is worth two minutes to thirty people, I will have at least broken even. In practice, I will probably have done better because I will have achieved other objectives: most notably the clarification of my own thought.

The value of the time ratio idea is primarily in helping you to avoid exposing people to pointless or irrelevant information. The self-selection involved in reading or not reading a blog is somewhat liberating in that capacity (compared to a seminar comment you have little choice but to listen to), but I should still aim to maintain a net cognitive surplus.

Ides of March, safely passed

First Easter break expedition imminent

My train to Chichester – via Basingstoke and Cosham – leaves Oxford at 7:15am on Saturday. Despite the best intentions of shifting my sleep schedule to make the requisite 6:00am wakeup more tolerable, I have been pushed further and further towards the pattern that I can only conclude is natural for me at present. That is to say, going to sleep sometime after 2:00am and then waking up at about the same point after 10:00am. Without classes or lectures in the morning or the burning shame of the scout discovering you still asleep, there is little that is able to propel me into wakefulness before then. Even my best efforts at setting the alarm on my phone and then hiding it across the room with a can of highly caffeinated energy drink have met with no success whatsoever.

In the end, it’s not much of a problem. I will have plenty of time to sleep on the train.

I am meant to arrive in Chichester three hours before the wedding and it seems probable to me that I will be able to walk to St. Richard’s Church, wherever it may be, from the train station in a fairly small fraction of that period of time. After the wedding and the reception, I will have most of Sunday to spend exploring the area, prior to my 4:30pm train back to Oxford. Is anyone familiar with the region? If so, is there anything you would suggest having a look at? The distance to the seashore seems modest, so I may go have a look at that.

Where there’s smoke

After five months of exposure to the social lives of Oxford students, my leather jacket is now thoroughly saturated with the smell of tobacco smoke. Despite efforts to air it out – sometimes even hanging it directly in front of an open window where I induce air flow – the scent seems to have become fairly deeply ingrained. Maybe entombing it in a box with some baking soda or activated charcoal for a while would be more effective.

The psychological impact of wearing the jacket has become odd. My earliest associations with tobacco have to do with somewhat threatening, carpeted places where I wasn’t happy to be. It’s a feeling that lingers whenever the stale smell of absent but infused smoke is present. The odour is certainly not one that I enjoy, or an happy to have lingering around me. It seems to be much more easily and thoroughly integrated into things made of natural substances. My wool and leather clothing has all taken on some measure of the smell, while no article of clothing made from artificial fibers has done so to an overly great extent. It all makes me disappointed about how months still remain before the smoking ban in British pubs comes into effect.

I have set up a temporary fix for the Blogger images problem. For the present, I will host the images on the BlogSpot servers, using a different account. Once the bug is fixed, I will repost the images on my FTP server. [19 March: This has now been done.]
I got more useful mail today: information on the Malta adventure, from my mother, along with details on the next student loan installment. Once this arrives, I should have this year and about 20% of next year covered. Still waiting on word from the Chevening Scholarship, Armand Bombardier Scholarship, Canadian Centennial Scholarship, and the Oxford Overseas Research Scholarship. The next batch of applications goes out in April.
In terms of blogging and being on instant messengers, internet activity among my friends in Canada seems to be markedly down. Is this because nice spring weather is starting to appear?
Did you know that light bulbs in England don’t screw into their sockets, like their North American equivalents? Along with running at twice the voltage, they also have somewhat fearsome looking sockets with large bare electrodes spring-loaded to hold the bulb in place.

Socially accomplished day

Happy Birthday Astrid

Good things in the mail

This morning, I was delighted to find a package from Meghan Mathieson in my pidge. Along with a letter, she sent me a vegetarian cookbook published by the British Columbia Ministry of Health and a package of that fieriest of snacks: Kasugai Roasted Hot Green Peas. Covered in a layer of dry Wasabi, they can have an exceptional amount of kick to them. They are just the kind of food that is ubiquitous in Vancouver, but quite unheard of here. Many thanks.

The cookbook, called The Vegetarian Edge is liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks and the kind of statements over-excited camp counsellors might make. For instance, it exclaims: “All right! You’ve decided to go vegetarian” before suggesting how to “Get to THE MAX each day!” It promises to be quite useful, though I have my doubts about whether I could consume the recommended 200-300g of tofu a day. I will provide extra protein in lentil form.

Good things in the evening

Spending some time with Nora, Kelly, and Bryn today was both enjoyable and appropriate, seeing as how I have less than a month left of living in the main site at Wadham. The aspect of the move that I regret most is that it risks further detaching me from social life in the college. Hopefully, that will not prove to be the case.

Social happenings later in the day also went very well. Spending three and a half hours talking with Roz tonight was really excellent. It was the kind of conversation in which you could feel the seeds of a great many future conversations – especially in the areas that I know relatively little about. It’s interesting to see how many of the same ideas come up in IR and literary theory, respectively, and how similar perspectives are associated with completely different people. All in all, it was the kind of conversation that strongly reinforces your sense that you were right in thinking a person interesting, as well as worth knowing better.

I hope I have the chance to see her again before she goes to Italy and I go to Malta.

It looks like I will be going to Cambridge for a Wadham exchange dinner on April 4th: the day my mother will be leaving the UK.
Seems that image posting is still broken. Sorry.
Private, to Meghan: I’m sorry we spent so many days eating spicy curry on potatoes…

Appeal to fellow geeks

Despite much tinkering, Blogger is still being awkward with regard to image uploads. The way it normally works is that you select an image to add and it generates two resized versions in JPG format: one at 1024×768 and the other at 320×240. It then uses the smaller image as an item in your post that links to the larger image. It does all this with a really odd looking block of code:

[a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” xhref=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_BIG.JPG” mce_href=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_BIG.JPG” ][img style=”float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;” xsrc=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_SMALL.JPG” mce_src=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_SMALL.JPG” border=”0″ alt=”DESCRIPTION” /][/a]

I’ve tried uploading small and large images of the right sizes and plugging the filenames into that template, but that doesn’t seem to work either, as well as being quite a pain.

I am trying to use the image tool to have it automatically resize and upload pictures to my FTP server. It can upload posts fine and non-image files fine, but it hangs every time I try to upload an image. In Firefox, it does so with “Waiting for photos.blogger.com…” listed at the bottom of the photo upload window. In Opera, it just hangs at the upload screen, without even the animation that usually accompanies the upload process. Safari shows the animation, but it never ends. The same tool is capable of uploading images to my BlogSpot hosted blog without problems.

I can put files in my uploaded images folder via an FTP client and I’ve checked the privileges on that folder. Obviously, the login information is correct. I’ve tried clearing my cache and cookies. I’ve also tried this process in Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.2, and the latest version of Safari. What else could be wrong? Is this a Blogger bug, or am I doing something wrong? Exactly the same setup worked fine three days ago.

NatWest: a very poor bank, indeed

Britain’s position as a global financial services hub is certainly not well reflected in the conduct of the particular bank I chose when I arrived in Oxford. Despite my dissatisfaction, however, the sheer level of hassle involved in switching banks as an international student will probably keep me where I am. I post this as a warning to those who will come after.

I continue to be astonished by how bad the online banking offered by NatWest is. The password system is frustrating and insecure. It’s impossible to pay your NatWest credit card bill online, even when you applied for it at the same time as you created your account. The site doesn’t even let you transfer funds between your chequing and savings accounts, unless you go set it up to do so in person. They also managed to forget to pay interest on my savings account for February. Those considering opening a bank account in the United Kingdom should absolutely avoid this bank.

Part of the problem is how NatWest has two separate divisions: one that runs the branches and knows nothing about the credit cards and web banking, and another that plays the opposite role. Despite the apparently clear delineation of duties, there seem to be serious communication problems between the two. They also have some truly bizarre rules about documents they can only send to your permanent address, even when it’s outside the U.K. and they know that you will not be there. Add to that high service charges (ie. $25 for a bank draft) and low interest (less than the rate of inflation) and you can understand the reasons for my dissatisfaction.

[Update: 20 May 2006] Another really awful thing about NatWest is the way their credit card payments work. At the start of the month, I am automatically billed some random amount between five and twelve Pounds. If I cancel the automatic payment, I get fined – even if I don’t owe any money. Since I almost never use the card now, that means I am building up more and more of a positive balance. Even so, they will ocassionally charge me a Pound or so of interest… seemingly at random and despite the fact that I don’t owe them any money. I’ve tried calling their telephone support line for an explanation, but I was kept on hold for ages and finally turned over to someone who didn’t seem to know anything she wasn’t reading straight off her screen. Completely unacceptable, all in all.

[Update: 12 February 2007] The NatWest Online Banking site now allows me to pay my credit card online. Previously, I couldn’t do anything but move money from my savings account to my chequing account, and not the converse. This is a distinct step forward.