I’ve been watching Maestro on the BBC recently and I’m in two minds about it. I like the show itself, which revolves around a number of celebrity’s learning to conduct an orchestra. The winner will get to conduct a piece during the BBC’s Proms in the Park. I didn’t watch the first episode, which from what I’ve heard about it later followed a slightly different format, but the two I have seen have followed a pretty simple format:

Each contestant has been given a piece of music the weak before, and a week in which to practice conducting it with the help of their mentor. We get to see some clips from the practice and then get to watch them conduct the BBC Concert Orchestra (and in the second one the BBC Symphony Choir as well) in this piece of music.

Their efforts are then initially judged by a panel of four experts who give point out of ten to each of the candidates. The two candidates with the lowest total scores then go on to the Orchestra Vote where the members of the orchestra (and the choir if present) decide which of them will be leaving and which of them lives to conduct another day.

It’s fun to watch and the music provides a nice background sound. So far so good. Except for one thing. Though the vote here is for the orchestra, rather than the general public and their phone lines, the formula is pretty representative of a lot of reality TV. And I’ve always tried to resist that type of programme in the past.

I’ll be the first to admit there’s probably some snobbery in that. But there’s also some rather more objective criticism. For a start these shows cost a lot less to produce than, say, a science fiction show. This is not, in itself, a crime, but there is a logic to TV production that – from what I’ve heard of it – can boil down to a very basic “cost per viewer” analysis of which programmes to make, and which not to make. What’s more the basic “viewers & phonelines” format of voting generates extra income from those phonelines, on top of any advertising revenue.

As long as there’s a demand for science fiction I’m not overly worried about reality TV killing it off completely. But chances are it will take some hits. Which wouldn’t be too bad if reality TV were a real replacement for it, but in my view it isn’t. Maestro peaked my interest because of two things:

• The presence of Sue Perkins, someone I’ve liked in everything I’ve seen her in so far.
• And the fact that I happen to like classical music quite a bit – though I wouldn’t dream of calling myself anything like an expert on it – and enjoy some of the behind the scenes stuff on what exactly it is a conductor adds to the orchestra.

So on the whole I’m not too worried that I’ll be watching the next dumbed down reality show to cross my TV guide with relish. But still, there are moments when I wonder whether Maestro might not be a gateway drug, slowly pulling me into the world of reality TV. Which is the reason I’m still a little bit in two minds about the show.

Every once in a while you run across a word that is eloquent. Most of the time eloquence needs sentences, even paragraphs, but some words just say something so neatly they are, in themselves, eloquent. I was thinking about making dough yesterday, after watching my recording of Monday’s episode of The Hairy Bakers from the BBC.¹

The ideal water temperature for making dough – warm enough to activate the yeast, but not hot enough to destroy it – is usually described as either handwarm, or tepid. In some places even plain old lukewarm is used. But I once ran across a word which, to my mind, says it much more eloquently: bloodwarm.

Bloodwarm is – to my mind – a far more precise measurement than handwarm (which can be anything from the temperature of your hands, to the warmest water your hands can take). It means literally the temperature of your blood, or in other words you internal body temperature. For human beings this is normally in a pretty narrow band of just about 1 degree C. And it’s pretty easy to guess just by feeling the water.

I don’t run across words that strike me that much often, but whenever I do it’s a joy. Somehow words like that manage to pound a prodigious amount of meaning into one neat little package, and I enjoy them very much indeed.
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¹ For those unfamiliar with the series, look here for a bit more info

I haven’t blogged about Bonekickers since episode two, but I have continued watching. The final episode is now several days behind me, but I’m just now getting around to blogging about it. Mostly because I haven’t really been able to decide what I think. Even now that I’m sitting down to write this, I’m still in two minds about some of it.

In final summary I’ve watched the series and it wasn’t so terrible I want those six hours of my life back. The series fails the instant you try to take it seriously, but as long as you take it for what it is (action based entertainment) it’s a reasonably enjoyable experience.

But on the other hand, while I did enjoy the series, it always left me with the nagging feeling that, somehow, it just wasn’t there. The writers did follow through on the arc they’d been planting since the start of the series in the final episode, but it turned out to be little more than an empty MacGuffin.¹

The bottom line is this: if (and this is a big if) there is a second series, I’m not sure I’d watch it. There was good stuff in the first series, but not really enough to make me anticipate a new series. It may have been a reasonably nice way to kill some time, but I’m not excited enough to be looking forward to a possible continuation.
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¹Wikipedia

The whole Ring Binder quest for my Gordian Knot print out turned out to be more difficult than I’d thought. For some reason several shops have decided to kick out plain white Ring Binders in favour of – as the manager of one of them termed it – “fashionable colours”.

But I finally managed to find some today. To be honest I was pretty sure the shop where I found them would still have them, but I was also pretty sure they’d be a bit on the expensive side. It actually wasn’t too bad (€3.25 per binder as opposed to ca. 2.50 at other stores with only “fashionable colours”) but regardless of the cost I’m a bit annoyed at having to go to one specific shop just to get a plain white two ring binder.

But anyway given the difficulty in finding them I decided to go ahead and get 4 of them at once. Since I’ve already decided to print another first draft manuscript, to see if I want to put that one next on the edit list, that just leaves me two spares. And depending on how I count them I have things either completed or in progress already for both of those at least, quite probably for a third.

More distantly I have stuff going on for another 4 of them at least, but I don’t expect any of that to complete a first draft in the (even slightly) near future. Except of course for my NaNoWriMo project for this year. With any luck I’ll need another binder at the end of November.

Or: A Tale Of Limited Bandwidth

I’m not sure whether I’ve blogged about this before or not, but I do some volunteering for a local chapter of the political party I belong to. One of the things I do there is system administration, which currently involves a switch from Windows to Linux. Which is why I am, right now, downloading hundreds of megabytes of uploads over a 512 kbit DSL line.

Now there’s nothing wrong with 512 kbit lines as such, I remember dialup well enough for even this to feel pretty snappy in some respects. But when you’re pulling several hundred megabytes over a line like this you do notice that the rest of the internet starts to feel slow. So as I’m on a Linux system, with Lynx installed, I decided to do a bit of browsing that way.

For those who don’t know it (though I think I’ve mentioned it before), Lynx is a console (text) based browser which, as it is text based, omits images as a matter of course. And on a somewhat stressed line getting rid of the images (90% or more of the data for most pages) speeds up browsing quite a bit. Even so it makes writing this blog entry a rather different from usual experience.

And it’s not just different, it’s also slightly nostalgic. I have no real memories of text only internet, but I do remember text only (DOS) computing, albeit without anything like the internet around at the time. Working with a black background and (mainly) light grey text does bring back memories. For that matter some elements in the interface, especially a bar with yellow text on a blue background at the bottom of the screen, make me nostalgic for Word Perfect 5.1.

I’ll end this entry here. I mainly started it to kill time while waiting for the downloads to complete, and from the look of it they’re nearly ready. Still it’s been a fun exercise in retro computing, and one I may well repeat at home.

I’ve just finished printing out the first, raw draft, version of Gordian Knot. It’s actually the first time I’ve printed the whole thing, since Ive been reading it from screen for the edit so far. But now I’ve decided I want to give the whole thing another read through, and this time I don’t much feel like doing it from screen.

So I’ve just finished printing some 60 double sided, single spaced A4 pages – containing a total of 92,340 words in 10 point Arial – punching holes in them, and putting them in a two ring binder. All in all I’m pretty happy with it, except for one thing. It’s a blue ring binder. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with blue, but so far it’s been my custom to use white ones for first drafts.

Unfortunately I’m currently out of white two ring binders. So I’ll have to make do with the blue one for now. I may well try to fit a shopping trip to go get another white one into tomorrow’s schedule though.

While talking about importing from Blogger to Wordpress with a friend I decided to go ahead and take the plunge myself (I’d been thinking about it for a while). So I’ve imported my old Blogger Writing Blog into this one. It’s going to take some time got get all 65 posts properly recategorised, but I’m making progress on that, and at least it means all my blogging is now in the same place.

Update: I’ve finished shoving everything I just imported into the “Old Writing Blog” category. I’ll probably go through later to add some more category details, but it’ll do for now. I’ve deleted exactly one old post, to be precise the “blog moved” post when I closed up that one and moved everything over here.

Yes I know, I haven’t actually finished the re-design yet. For that matter I’m not at all certain the current code will survive, but I have got a testing version of the new layout up and running… more or less. Right now it’s got a hack to display right in IE6 and probably still needs one to work in IE7, but that can wait.

You can have a look at the testing version of the site now right here. The only thing not working in the testing version is the blog. And the front page content is currently identical to the My NaNo History page because I had to have a good amount of text in a hurry and that happened to be easily available. I guess I’m really going to have to figure out what the hell I want to do with the front page when I put this design up for real.

I’m also by no means certain about the current colour scheme, or for that matter anything beyond the basic layout. But having said that, it is a pretty fair test run for the basic layout. Oh and one more IE6 note: the on hover sub menu switching doesn’t work in IE6. I’m currently considering whether or not it’s going to be worth the effort of hacking in some javascript to get that to work. I have no particular sympathy for anyone using IE6 voluntarily, but many people are forced to use it at work (I should know, I’m one of them).

I finished reading a trilogy last night. To be precise the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson. I read the First Chronicles (technically just called the Chronicles) quite a few years ago, and started looking around for the Second Chronicles shortly after. Unfortunately my local bookstore only ever had parts of the First Chronicles in stock. And for some reason this never made it onto my online purchase lists.

Fast forward now to 2005, suddenly the First Chronicles were no longer the only thing in stock at the bookstore. Now The Runes Of The Earth, part one of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, had appeared. Still nothing from the Second Chronicles, and without reading those I wasn’t too interested in the Last Chronicles. Fast forward another 30 months or so to June of this year (or there abouts). Suddenly the Second Chronicles were there. Not piece by piece, but as a complete trilogy in a one volume omnibus.

After hesitating for a few moments (pondering my budget) I decided to go for it. For three books it actually wasn’t expensive, and I’d been looking for it for so long it would felt churlish if I didn’t buy it. Of course I didn’t have time to read it when I bought it, so I put it on the shelf along with the other books waiting for me to get around to them.

Fast forward again, to last Wednesday. I wasn’t feeling too well, and because it was quiet had the chance to come home early from work. On impulse I got the Second Chronicles down from the shelf they were on and started reading. Before the end of Thursday morning I’d finished Book One: The Wounded Land. I was home, not feeling well, again for most of Friday and managed to get through some 75% of Book Two: The One Tree.

Saturday I finished Book Two and started on Book Three: White Gold Wielder. That left me plenty of time on Sunday to finish Book Three. Though I held back for quite a while because the Chronicles, while well written, aren’t what I’d call light reading. Donaldson’s style sucks you along into a world where Despair is the main enemy, and pulls you in so deep it’s almost painful at times.

All of which brings me to my present dilemma: The Runes Of The Earth came out in 2004, and the second book of the Last Chronicles – Fatal Revenant – appeared in 2007. But, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the Last Chronicles are actually going to be a four part series (at least) with the final book not expected before 2013.¹

So the old dilemma of any series, particularly series not meant to be read as standalones (which the Chronicles have never been so far) raises it’s head again. On the one hand I’m tempted to jump in, to see where things will go after the end of the Second Chronicles. But at the same time, do I want to start something now I won’t be able to finish until 2013 at the earliest. There’s no way to say for certain what I’ll do over the next few years, but right now chances are I’ll wait, there already too many books I’m waiting for, some from series that are much better standalone reads than I’m expecting here.
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¹ Here to be exact

I intend to order some books today. There’s just one problem. I ended up taking a rather dangerous approach to shopping online. When I found out that my favourite online bookstore had added a “bargain basement” section of books between €2.99 and €5.99 I started clicking through them like a kid clicking through a candy store.

As a result I now have close to twenty books sitting in my checkout list. Amazingly even at that the bill would still be just under €100 but that’s rather more than I’m looking to spend right now. So I’m having to do something I rarely do, I’m taking books I like the look of and kicking them out of the list. I’m not sure yet what the total order will be, but it’s going to be less than it is now.