wt3

Surf

Departure Vector 6

So, here we are. (That's the royal we, obviously, in this case signifying me and hundreds of seemingly offensively happy strangers; I may be various things right now, and some may even be offensive, but happy really isn't one of them.) In the lounge, waiting to board one scary chunk of airframe whose first flight was noted here alarmingly many years ago.

Peter struggled to hold it together at our parting, and who can blame him? How exactly is one supposed to deal with this sort of thing, with the very high likelihood of it being a last farewell? Surgical options have been ruled out, and chemo has a piss-poor record for this disease. But this is life, nothing's sure.

Except that I must now go and get onto a flight that will seem to last a significant fraction of the lifetime of the universe. Bleah. See you on the other side. (It's very cold there, they tell me.)

Ash Wednesday

No pancake party this year. At least, not yet. There's a vague chance of some kind of postponed thing after my return, whenever that may be. (Next Friday is the currently scheduled date.) We shall see.

In any case, there's something ironic about spending this Shrove Tuesday uncelebrated in Sydney, given that the original impetus behind my pancake tradition was as consolation for missing this city's Mardi Gras -- an event in which I now have virtually no interest at all. And for all that I still sort of love the place, I suspect the business at hand may come close to exhausting my desire to spend time here.

Not that things are all bad. Peter likes, when not crippled by pain or addled by things meant to block it, to fill the time up with ~~hollow trash~~ entertainments, some of which have even been rather entertaining. Opera, music, films, walks, ferry rides, food and drink. He himself can barely eat, but encourages the rest of us to enjoy such things. He has some fine wines that need attention, set aside long ago for special occasions. What could be more special than this?

And then there's the fun of word puzzles to keep his mind ticking over and distracted from agony, worked through in (zeugma is your friend) a hot bath and a narcotic haze. The Herald's celebrated DA is no Araucaria, but worth a look even so. I do, however, fear it may be some while after all this is over before I can bear to look at another fucking cryptic crossword.

Words Fail

Early morning after my last post I was woken by a phone call from Australia. It was my father, ringing to tell me that the crippling intestinal pain that had eluded explanation by dismissive retard gastroenterologists for the preceding months had finally been identified as inoperable pancreatic cancer. Prognosis maybe three months to live, and not pretty ones at that.

Somehow it hasn't felt much like something to blog about.

Anyway. The diagnosis is becoming a little more nuanced, and some rather complicated surgery may turn out to be possible, benefits uncertain. Or it may not. The general picture remains pretty fucking dismal.

So. Tomorrow morning I'm flying off to Sydney for a few weeks. The prospect scares me. Dorigen said on parting today: "Make it all OK, Matt. Make it all OK." I would if I could.

I guess I'll probably touch base here from time to time.

Filler 58

It is snowing again, very tiny flakes that look more like fog. Sifting lightly onto tree branches and rooftops, but no prospect of settling more fully. This whole arctic spell has been, again, a thorough disappointment here in the overheated city centre, a bit icy, a bit nippy, but cursedly short on the white stuff. You know I'm no fan of winter, but if it has to be cold and dark it could at least have the decency to be picturesque as well.

Work proceeds at the rather glacial pace of any endeavour that depends on (i) the cultivation of cells and (ii) the design, manufacture and assembly of intricate machinery. Neither of these things is the ostensible purpose of my PhD, but you need the means before you can get to the end. Not that even having the means is any guarantee. And the means themselves might not be attainable. But, like, whatever.

In any case, (i) and (ii) are currently dominating my work time, especially (i). The general plan is to confine the bulk of cell culture duties to one day a week, but just now it's taking up more than three. This is partly on account of the New Year fresh start after clearing the decks before Christmas, partly because I'm experimenting with several different culture protocols, but anyway it's excessive.

Christmas, btw, lives on at home, as we have yet to bring ourselves to undec the tree. It's just too pretty, and goes so well with the flat. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps.

In case you were wondering, my most distinctive Christmas present was a ukulele, from Ian. However, I am not yet able to play Dy-na-mi-tee, Wuthering Heights or Smells Like Teen Spirit.

What else? Liked Avatar much more than I expected, doubtless because of expecting so little. It was a bit daft and a bit long and a teensy bit Roger Dean, but real prettylike. Especially Sam Worthington. The animation was fantastic, in a whole other universe from the leaden mo-cap-by-numbers mannequin ilk of Beowulf. And the 3D was mostly subtle and nice, and only occasionally fell apart when whooshing around too fast in too complex environments. Definitely worth going out to the big screen for, and how often can you say that these days?

Oh, and, it's that time again: birthdays. Happy Faustus yesterday and happy Alastair the weekend. See y'all around (but Alastair sooner, I suspect).

Decadence

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to those who complain about the slippage of century start points. Theirs is a pointless, party-pooping argument, but sort of correct in it's crassly literal way. Anyone who attempts to extend it to decades, however, is clearly an idiot. Decades are not ordinal, and 2010 isn't noughty.

In any case, this new 10 year stretch has begun in mostly unremarkable fashion. True, we've got a new Doctor, after the most dragged-out regeneration ever, and can raise a glass to having seen the back of Russell T. And various people have been snowbound, prompting imbecile questions in the House about global warming. It's coming down right now and perhaps may even get a little foothold here in the chilly Smoke, though surely not for long. YMMV.

But the main thing for me is the return to the grind, embarking on the long slog of what ought to be my final year. We'll see about that, but just now I'm feeling oddly optimistic about the whole thing. I still have no data and only an outside chance of getting any, but I do have a plan of attack, a way forward, which makes a nice change. It's even possible, after some testing today, that the long-awaited (two years and counting) laser confocal additions to my SICM rig may be (very gradually) edging towards viability. That didn't seem the case at all before Christmas, and in all likelihood the hope will vanish again just like the falling snow, but for now let's cherish both.

Annual

I never did get around to describing the appalling goatfuck in the environs of the Thames last New Year's Eve. And I don't think I can do it justice now, or face trying. Suffice to say that the combination of huge crowds, hamfisted policing and slack-jawed neanderthal security contractors made for a ghastly and at times potentially life-threatening experience.

And so: not this time.

After a decade of calmly strolling down to the river to see the pretty lights, this year we'll be hiding indoors and watching it on TV, away from the crush of screaming bodies, away from the echoes of Hillsborough and other crowd-control disasters past. Safely cocooned in our luxury flat, walled off from our fellows in cosy, glorious isolation.

Welcome to 2010: the year we make contact.

Have a good one, y'all.

Post Mortem

The conference went ahead, mostly as planned.

And indeed was in many ways a complete success. The co-organiser henceforth known only as the weasel in a cardboard shirt couldn't resist a couple of last ditch bids for that Twat of the Year tiara, and attendance was not quite as high as registrations might have led one to hope, but only one speaker was kept at bay by the snow and the talks were of a startlingly high standard.

I actually enjoyed the day a lot. Which isn't to say I will ever do anything like it again.

Oh, and, for the record, the week also saw my first ever pub quiz, at the tail end of the Smart lab Xmas outing. My bowling may suck -- no denying -- but at least I can spot Mother Teresa in Santa drag FTW.

You know you want me on your team.

Wintry

It's snowing lightly, as for the last few hours, but as yet still a far cry from the ruinous blizzards we were promised. But it may happen.

Question is, what will the effect be on our conference tomorrow? Various speakers have to travel from far flung reaches of the country. Will we be watching an empty space?

I shall report.

Avuncular 4

Unrecorded

Among my companions for tonight's dinner at a random Lebanese restaurant in Earl's Court were a couple of bloggers even less current than myself. Indeed, it turns out that Stairs of GB is no longer even online -- at least its content isn't -- though as the boy himself pointed out, there's always the wayback machine for such trifles as one can't bear to lose.

I was, in any case, reminded of how handy it is to have a record of what was going on back then, if not in exact detail day-to-day -- and how dull would that be? -- at least as a kind of mnemonic collage of some bits of what was on my mind.

I like having my history scrawled down in this haphazard form. I don't want to have to put much work into maintaining it, but I definitely don't want it just vaporising. This is one of the reasons I took so badly to the MT4 upgrade: I'm not willing to lose my past to the pushy whims of SixApart's developers. The previous WTs need to stay as they are. Remaking them in a new form would be cheating. (As well as far too much effort...)

Still, let's face it, that kind of haphazard scrawling isn't really happening around here much anymore. And though I don't necessarily miss it right now, I have a feeling I'll be a bit miffed in years to come about these great gaps in the fossil record.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to do much about it -- the posting frequency of those early years is certainly a thing of the past -- but perhaps I'll try to leave my future self a few clues from time to time.

And look, here's one now.

Crushed by the wheels of industry

As trailed a few posts ago, the last few weeks have brought performances by several companies of long-term WT interest. Jasmin Vardimon's Yesterday was the most familiar, a collage of material from earlier pieces reworked into near unrecognisability, shown last year at the Peacock and now returned to the more intimate environs of The Place. I liked this a lot the first time around, and it seemed even better on repeat viewing -- the choreography is striking and beautiful, the performances fluidly brilliant and the integration of some fairly flashy technology works a treat without seeming at all gratuitous. Vardimon is, as usual, especially good at capturing the tics and attitudes of British masculinity, but is also more generally touching, managing to make contact with some pretty fundamental emotions. Become a memory indeed.

Lea Anderson's boy band The Featherstonehaughs were instrumental in the creation of my abiding interest in contemporary dance, and are now being reconstituted as a distinct company for the first time in many years. Their R&D show -- also at The Place -- combined fragments of their last proper solo outing, The Featherstonehaughs draw on the sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, which is being prepared for revival, with some preliminary feints towards a new, as yet untitled, work intended to premiere next year. The company now boasts nine (count 'em) dancers, all but one of them completely new; they're all talented and have clearly been working very hard. The material wasn't any kind of radical departure, but it was distinctive and very enjoyable and generally seemed to bode well for next year's tour. Perhaps put off by the evening's "work in progress" status, none of my usual partners in crime were willing to come along to this, but it was actually surprisingly polished and entertaining. Given what I've seen I think I'll probably manage to drag at least one or two to the finished product. For anyone else, it's definitely worth a look.

And then there was Shunt, very much up to their old tricks again with new show Money. Easily their best work since the excellent Dance Bear Dance, this was another exercise in playing games with the audience, this time inside a brilliant machine set whose whirring and clanking seemed -- these things are hazy at best -- to embody the grinding awfulness of modern capitalism. Amidst much weird Lynchian awkwardness, the show makes its viewers complicit in an ill-advised entrepreneurial enterprise that may or may not be The Future. It's true that the set pieces don't really add up to much in the end, and there's never the sort of transformative surprise that DBD furnished, but it's highly enjoyable along the way, and leaves one with some memorable images, skewed perspectives, and perhaps a balloon. Not many shows serve you up a glass of bubbly partway through, or pelt you with brightly coloured balls, and who can resist either tactic?

Restoration

And so, back to MT3. In fact I've upgraded to version 3.38 in the hope it would correctly feed categories to BlogPress, but alas not. I've added a cheesy workaround for that, and comments and so on should now work correctly. The 3.38 interface is a little fussier than 3.14, but it's still a world away from the ghastly MT4.

We now return you to your scheduled uneventfulness.

Empty For Redux

Far back in the mists of ancient time, commenting on one of the very first WT posts, my old friend Dan had this to say about Movable Type:

Isn't MT an absolute joy? The more I use it, the more I get a thrill at the way it meekly and rather perfectly does its job and doesn't demand anything in return. Sort of like an efficient public-sector librarian. The real antithesis of your Microsoft Bloatware all-singing all-dancing West-End production. Let's hear it for software which doesn't insult your intelligence!

I mean, can you imagine: Microsoft buy Moveable Type:

"It looks like you're writing a blog entry. Would you like some help?"

Those days are gone. I fucking hate MT4. The gaudy, self-congratulatory, overweight obstructive shitpile that is its current interface is to the old MT what Windows is to Mac -- and I mean Windows Me, not anything vaguely tolerable like XP. It is cluttered, dog slow and fucking useless.

And intrusive. It thinks it knows best. It is, of course, wrong.

MT's security has always been a bit shit. Now they've plastered all kinds of crap over the top to try to stop up the holes, and who knows? Maybe it would work -- if it would fucking work. Instead, it just makes it actually impossible for my own -- never beaten, btw -- spam avoidance measure to run at all, and instead demands my whole site be substantially restructured or forego comments.

FUCK OFF!

I'm not interested in your clunky paraphernalia of user registrations and such. And I'm not interested in your enforcement of irrelevant accessibility guidelines. And I don't want to scrub through a bunch of fucking pop-up menus just to change an entry's excerpt.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

At the moment I'm using an unholy bodge to get comments working, a sort of Frankenstein monster stitched together from parallel installs of MT3 and 4. This is clearly a very bad idea, probably leaving my whole database in some hopelessly broken state only days away from catastrophic failure, but the alternatives are even less appealing. Probably the best option is just to downgrade -- but then I don't think I'd be able properly to do what I am now, which is posting from my phone.

It's a dilemma.

In the meantime, if you haven't upgraded to MT4, my advice is: don't. It sucks.

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