williamjm

This week I've watched the series finales of two TV series I've been watching for the last 4 or 5 years - Battlestar Galactica and Regenesis (somewhat belatedly in both cases since their last episodes were broadcast quite a while ago - and it has been hard to avoid all the spoilers flying around for BSG).

Some spoilers:
( BSG finale )
Unsurprisingly, I didn't have any problem avoiding spoilers for Regenesis, since not many people seem to watch it, which I think is unfortunate since IMO it's been one of the best TV shows of the past decade. The show is set in a Toronto biology lab of a fictitious organisation responsible for responding to biological threats in North America, everything from bioterrorism and virus outbreaks through to illegal attempts at genetic engineering. It's a Science Fiction show, but not in the all-too-common sense of having some dubious quality science to explain why the show has robots and spaceships, but it is actually a show about science where all the main characters are scientists. It is a rare example of a show that doesn't shy away from using lots of scientific terminology, and as far as I can tell most of it is based in real science - although admittedly, biology was the science I didn't do at school so I'm not best placed to judge, and some of the plots do go a bit beyond real science into genuine Science Fiction territory. It also does a good job of showing the scientific process and the limitations of it - see the multiple episodes where the characters exasperatedly try to explain to the media or politicians why just because a scientific study didn't find a drug was harmful, doesn't necessarily mean it was safe, or that just because they haven't yet explained a disease outbreak doesn't mean it was necessarily a terrorist attack. As refreshing as it is to have a show that is actually reasonably scientifically literate, that wouldn't have made it a great show on its own, but the quality of the writing, dialogue, characterisation and storytelling is very high, the show is fast-moving and frequently compelling both in its plots and the interactions of the characters. The production values, directing and acting are all very high quality as well - the lead actor, Peter Outerbridge, is particularly good in his portrayal of David Sandstrom, a memorable and entertaining character is simulataneously a scientific genius and also an irascible and deeply flawed alcoholic.

That said, after four seasons of frequently excellent storytelling, I found the final episode a huge disappointment and I'd say far inferior to the BSG finale, despite its weaknesses.
( vague spoilers for Regenesis finale )
Regardless of which of the two possible interperations of the last episode you use, it's almost certainly the worst (by a considerable distance) of any of the 52 episodes of the show. Despite that, I'd still recommend the show, it was more episodic than, say, BSG, and therefore the quality of the earlier episodes is not negatively impacted by the poor ending in the way a more story-arc based show would be.

I went to see the new Wolverine film at the cinema today. It has had some pretty bad reviews so I wasn't expecting much, I wouldn't say it was necessarily as bad as some of the reviews are saying, but it still wasn't particularly good. Hugh Jackman and Liev Schriber are good in the two lead roles, but I thought some of the supporting acting was a little bit weak - in particular, the actor playing Stryker couldn't really live up to Brian Cox's portrayal of the character in X2. The plot was OK for a run-of-the-mill superhero story, but the whole thing did feel slightly pointless since it didn't add much to what we already knew about Wolverine's past, from X-Men 2 we already knew about Wolverine's powers, how he got the adamantium skeleton and Stryker's involvement so the only new thing we learn is why he had amnesia. Overall, not a bad film, but a mediocre one, which at least makes it significantly better than the awful mess that was X-Men 3.

In last week's post about the cinema I was complaining about Let The Right One In not being on at any Cambridge cinema any more despite them still showing a trailer for it. It seems that it will be on for a single showing tomorrow at about 2, so I might go and see that, since it has had significantly better reviews than Wolverine.

I went to the cinema as a passenger in my friend's new Smart Car that he's just bought. It is quite an unusual experience at first compare to a normal car, you do seem to notice the quality of the road surface much more (particularly the number of potholes) and driving over speed-bumps at anything over about 15 mph in it can be a slightly alarming experience, which is annoying considering there are five of them just to get to the end of Chesterton High Street (the road I live next to).

On Sunday I'll have been working and living in Cambridge for 5 years. Most of the time it doesn't seem that long since I left Edinburgh, it probably feels more like 3 or maybe 4 years at most.

I was reminded today that I have been here quite a long time, when one of my colleagues asked me a couple of question about the purpose of a code change I wrote back in September 2004 and I first I had absolutely no memory of making that change. Fortunately, he asked the question via e-mail (he said that he realised that if he'd just come and asked me in person I'd probably have had no idea what he was talking about) so I was able to do a bit of research before answering and after looking at the code for a bit and finding a 4-and-a-half year old weekly report in my sent e-mails folder that described a little bit of the change (although not why it was initially made) I think I was able to answer his questions reasonably well. I suppose it is one of the potential perils of working for the same company for 5 years that you can get asked questions about things you can barely even remember. At least this change seemed fairly reasonable, there have been occasions when I've looked at a bit of code I wrote a couple of years ago and wondered how I could have thought that was a good idea.

I went to see Watchmen at the cinema today, having previously finished reading the graphic novel last weekend. I'd actually bought the graphic novel from Amazon about sixth months ago after commenting on catrionamacnair 's livejournal that it sounded interesting and I might consider reading it before the film came out and being told I had to buy and read it immediately it was so good. I did buy it shortly after, but then took quite a while before actually getting around to reading it although the imminent release of the film finally made me pick it up (I also had to wait a bit for it to dry out, since Amazon helpfully left the package outside my door all day on a day when we had a torrential thunderstorm).

( Some spoilers )

Merry Christmas, everyone :)

Hope you all have a good day.

What would you do with £1 Million? If you're Inventor John Taylor then you spend the money on building a giant mechanical clock made of gold with no numbers on it which tells the time (but only every 5 minutes) using some blue lights and a giant mechanical grasshopper and you put it on a Cambridge street corner where it will spend the rest of time baffling passers-by and disrupting traffic as crowds gather in the middle of the street to stare at the clock.

I read the story about its unveiling on BBC news yesterday (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7625815.stm) and I was planning to go into town anyway today so I thought I may as well wander past it and have a look. It is an insane-looking thing and almost completely useless as a clock but strangely fascinating nonetheless.

( Photos )
I watched the first episode of Merlin today. I guess it's better than Robin Hood and it's watchable and Eve Myles' witch was quite good (although rather reminiscent of Stardust, which is unfortunate as it mainly reminded me how much Stardust was), that's probably about all the good points I can think of. The storytelling is wearily predictable and didn't really make much sense - the plot relies on Merlin being such an idiot (using magic continually when it is banned, fighting with Arthur not once but twice when both could lead to him being executed) that it's implausible he's survived as long as he had, also it would have made more sense for the witch to try to do something before her son was executed rather than starting to try to do something just after he had his head chopped off. I'll probably still watch more of it, hopefully it will improve.

On Friday I took the train up from Cambridge to Scotland. The journey went fairly smoothly at first but unfortunately the train up from Peterborough to Edinburgh was delayed by 16 minutes, which under normal circumstances wouldn't be too unreasonable a delay for a 300 mile journey but when the gap between my predicted arrival at Edinburgh and when I should have caught the train up to here was also precisely 16 minutes. To taunt me even more the train schedulers had decided to put the train I should have caught on the opposite side of the platform to the one the train I arrived on so that I could easily have got over to the other side of the platform and even touched the train but could not have got on it because the doors being locked on the other train seemed to be precisely timed to coincide with the doors unlocking on my train. On its own this would not have been that bad, and I looked at the timetable and thought I'd probably just get on the 16:33 train instead (this was about half past three). Unfortunately about 20 minutes before it was scheduled to depart the departure change was suddenly changed to 18:16, naturally there was no explanation at first although eventually it was explained that they had to put a new engine in the train which is probably quite a good reason for a delay. I attempted to get on the 17:40 train which stopped at the same stations but was informed that because this was a Scotrail service rather than a National Express service my ticket was not valid. For a while they were going to put us on a bus instead, but then decided that taking into account the time it would take the bus to get out of Edinburgh during Friday rush hour it would be faster to wait for the train to be fixed. Therefore I spent quite a bit of time wandering round Waverley station, if it hadn't been raining heavily outside I might have been able to wander round Edinburgh a bit but I stayed mostly inside although I did also go round the neighbouring Princes Mall and discovered that since I lived in Edinburgh it has changed from a shopping centre with a large selection of rubbish shops into a shopping centre with a small selection of rubbish shops and a lot of empty stores. Eventually at 18:20 the train finally left and I got here about half past 8 only 11 hours after I originally left my flat in Cambridge. I know a three-hour delay is fairly minor in the scale of transportation problems but it was particularly galling since it could all have been avoided if the first train had just got into Waverley a minute earlier.

Today was a more relaxing day. My uncle and aunt came up to visit, as he always does my uncle insisted on us going for a walk - fortunately there was no repeat of the time he took us out for a supposedly short walk and we ended up climbing a reasonably large and steep hill on a very hot day without having anything to drink (this happened about 15 years ago but apparently none of us have forgotten). Despite the forecast of 'heavy rain' and the rest of Britain apparently having turned into New Atlantis it was actually sunny and dry all day here.

From the last post I think the current tally is that 9 people thought I had an obviously Scottish accent, two didn't think I sounded Scottish and two couldn't really remember what my accent sounded like.

Speaking of Scotland I'll be up there from next Friday for a week or so (from the 5th to the 15th September). I'm deliberately not planning to do much because so far this year I haven't really had a long break where I've just had a rest for a few days and I'm starting to feel like not doing anything for a few days might be a nice change. Particularly since on my return from holiday I've probably got about three days of near-constant meetings as we try to plan the next year of work, so I think I'll need to be well-rested before that or I'll probably just fall asleep in them.

Of course, I'm probably not going to spend the entire holiday doing nothing so if anyone can think of anything interesting going on in Scotland that week then I'm happy to listen to suggestions.

Digital Cameras are a fantastic invention, but they do have certain drawbacks. I've only just finished sorting through all the photographs I took while on my trip to the Scottish islands the middle of last month and uploading the better ones to Flickr. Despite only being away for three days I took about 350 photographs, it's a good thing I don't tend to go on long holidays or I'd have just amount of photographs to sort through. The tedious bit this time was cropping quite a lot of the photographs because the disadvantage of taking boat trips is that while the scenery may be impressive there will inevitably be the heads of the other people in the boat (and sometimes bits of the boat itself) getting in the way. The biggest density of photographs was from Staffa, despite the fact that I was only there for about an hour and a half I seem to have managed to take about 120 photographs. I blame the fact it was implausibly scenic:


I've also been trying to decide what I'm going to do with my remaining holidays for this year. After discounting all the days which I've got some sort of plan for I've got about a week left to take sometime before Christmas. Currently I'm thinking I'll probably go up to visit my family in Scotland, since I haven't really been 'home' much this year and it would be nice just to have a relatively relaxing time rather than going away anywhere - it also might allow me time to meet up with some of my friends from my university days in Edinburgh that I haven't seen for quite a while. Currently I'm thinking of probably either early September or mid-October (because most of the rest of the time I have various things planned already) - anyone know of anything interesting happening in Scotland about those dates that would suggest one time was better than the other?

I've been on the west coast of Scotland for the past few days. We spent three nights in Oban, a frankly fairly unattractive town in a very scenic setting. We took two day-trips over to the Isle of Mull and surrounding islands. The first involved setting off from Oban on the ferry at 9:30 in the morning (from a ferry terminal that appears to have been designed to feel as much like an airport terminal as possible, although quite why anyone would want anything to feel like an airport terminal is beyond me). At this point the weather was extremely overcast, probably about 15 degrees centigrade with a strong and bitingly cold wind (my hands were actually starting to feel a bit numb after standing on deck taking photographs for a while) - in the Scottish islands this is what's usually referred to as a good summer day. We then took a bus over to Fionnphort on the west of the island passing some fairly impressive-looking mountains (including the pyramid-topped Ben More). We then got on a smaller boat to go to the island of Staffa. Staffa is a very interesting place to visit, the columns of rock rising a couple of hundred feet straight out of the Atlantic Ocean are impressive to look at and the famed Fingal's Cave was particularly impressive to walk into. On top of the island it is surprisingly green with some very spectacular views of the surrounding islands and it's actually quite pleasant if you can ignore the continual wind (the sun had come out by this point which helped a lot). The only disappointment is that the captain of the boat had promised puffins on the island but I didn't see any of them :( After that we headed over to the isle of Iona, taking a detour along the way so we could be touristy and take photographs of a large marine animal identified by most people at the time as a basking shark, although my marine biology knowledge (mostly obtained from looking at the posters in the ferry terminal) suggests it may actually have been a minke whale, it was quite an impressive animal whatever it was. I liked Iona, it was a very tranquil picturesque island although the famed abbey is perhaps not terribly interesting for those of us with little interest in religion. After that another ferry back to Fionnphort, back on the bus and the ferry to Oban. At some point during the day I seemed to manage to get sunburned, which given that the day started off so overcast, the forecast was for heavy rain and Mull not being noted as one of the sunnier parts of the country I was a bit surprised that it was that sunny.
The next day we went back to Mull and wandered round Duart and Torosay Castles, both of which are reasonably interesting to visit although if I was writing a list of ten most interesting castles in Scotland I wouldn't consider either of them. This also involved a trip on Mull railway back to the ferry pier, which is a railway so small that to turn the train round at the end of the line the drivers gets out, pushes the engine to a turntable and turns it around by hand.

Other things of interest visited were McCaig's Folly, a large round arched thing overlooking Oban up a very steep hill (from being in Cambridge so long I appear to have let the muscles necessary to climb slopes fall out of use) which was apparently meant to be inspired by the Colosseum in Rome, although I can only assume McCaig had never actually seen the Colosseum but merely heard it described in a pub once. It is a good viewpoint, though. Also saw Castle Stalker a few miles up the coast, more familiar to some of you as the fearsome Castle Aaaaaargh at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sadly, it isn't open to the public (unlike the fascinating Doune Castle used for most of the rest of the castles in the film which I went round a few years ago).

Tomorrow I'll be visiting family in St Andrews, then I'll be going down to Cambridge on the train on Monday. After that it'll be back to work although I feel like I've been busy enough that I need another holiday to recover from the holiday.