My MiL frequently gives Sylvia grief if she doesn't send a birthday card to her grandparents in good time. Imagine then, how gratifying it was for Sylvia's birthday card from my MiL (her birthday was yesterday) to arrive this morning. Here's why:



We've lived in this house for 9 years. Sylvia has lived in Cambridge since 1993. My mother-in-law still not only does not know our postcode, but after several times of being told, she still writes it s C-something-or-other, a number, space, squiggle, presumably on the basis that postcodes are part of addresses and she Must Put One On, even if it's not the right one, or even illegible.

In this case she seems to have written CM6 squiggle. CM6 would be somewhere near Chelmsford, I imagine. Cambridge is CB, not CM, and we live in CB1, not CB6. Presumably the Royal Mail sent the card to Chelmsford, where the sorting office looked at it, scratched their heads, crossed out the "CM6" bit, and put it back in the post, for it to make its way here, with further manual intervention because it doesn't have a postcode.

I could phone my mother-in-law and tell her this, but it would be a waste of effort because she almost certainly won't care. She's been told our postcode many times, but never writes it down. This no-doubt gives her a reason to complain about how terrible it is that the postal service can't get a card to Sylvia, oh woe is her, etc. etc..

Normal human beings would just write the damned post code down.

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/204852.html - you can comment here or there.

Yesterday, I cycled down Victoria Road from New Hall, and went round Mitcham's Corner Roundabout over Victoria Avenue bridge. Unfortunately, this necessitates being in the right hand lane for about 150m until Milton road splits off. Is it better to:

* Squish in to the left, letting cars overtake very narrowly?
* Squish in to the right, and try to gesture to cars that if they want to overtake, they can be the one to invade another lane?
* Cycle down the white line?
* Cycle in the left lane, but not have enough time to pull out before the roads split?
* Dismount?
* Train until I can reliably accelerate to 20mph in much less than that distance?
* Force anyone behind me to wait 100m to overtake?

Just because it's the freaking Sultans of Ping FC, here's THAT SONG.

Campaign for America's Future blogger, history whiz, and policy genius Sara Robinson talked me into reading David H. Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America about a month ago. It's a vaguely interesting book, if (I think) less useful than Robinson pitches it to be. Fischer's basic premise is that the pre-revolutionary United States was colonized in four distinct waves, each of which consisted almost entirely of people from one of four historically, culturally distinct regions of England, and that most of our regional and political subcultures are derived from the regional cultures of those four parts of England: not just politics and religion, but also dialect of English, marriage customs, child-rearing customs, diet, popular names for children and for landmarks, and so on. It's entertaining, but mostly fluff. But one part of it did stick with me, and I thought of it again when I read Rich Perlstein's Newsweek column for July 10th, "Beyond the Palin: Why the GOP is falling out of love with gun-toting, working-class whites." (h/t David "Orcinus" Neiwert)

You see, one of Fischer's contentions is that because of the way the various regional cultures of Great Britain clashed with each other historically, all descendants of Britain and its colonies are in love with the word "liberty" and use it as their central rallying cry, even though (and this is the important part) they don't mean the same thing by it. They recognize that there are a lot of individual liberties: liberty to do this or that, liberty from this or that, whatever. But the four different folk-cultures Fischer identifies each considered one of the many kinds of liberty to be the number-one essential liberty: no matter how free you are in any other way, you're not really free unless ...

• To the Puritans who settled New England, you weren't really free unless you had the liberty to enforce comformity with social norms, either by shaming people into complying, or expelling those who can't be shamed. The most essential liberty is the feeling of safety you get when you're among people who are the same kind of people as you.
  
  
• To the Cavaliers who settled the lowland coastal South, you weren't really free unless you were free to own slaves. The most essential liberty is the right of the best people, however that's defined, to own the lesser breeds and force them to do what their betters want them to do.
  
  
• To the Radical Protestants who settled the Chesapeake Bay, you weren't really free unless you had the freedom to say, do, or believe whatever you wanted in total safety, even from people who disagree. The most essential liberty is the right to be protected, via the power of the state, from other people forcing their beliefs, their culture, their way of life on you. And here's the part that's especially relevant to what Perlstein wrote the other day ...
  
  
• To the "Scots-Irish" Borderers (who were already being called "rednecks" back in Great Britain) who settled the Appalachians, you weren't really free if there was anybody who was allowed to snub you, to look down on you. The most essential liberty is the liberty to be just as rude to the wealthy people who own all the land in the county, and to the people you owe so much money to that they for all practical purposes own you, as you would be to the meanest, poorest drunk.

And ever since Richard Nixon invented the "Southern Strategy," and certainly ever since Ronald Reagan perfected it, that's been the Republican coalition in a nutshell: people who expect to be free to own other Americans keep the votes of most of the people they own by remembering not to talk down to them. Hence the spectacle, that used to be seen all over this country as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, of wealthy bankers and state governors and federal legislators going to agricultural county fairs, if they wanted to keep their money and their political offices and all of their power, wearing proletarian clothes and eating messy food with their hands and stomping around in animal waste and affecting to be "just common folks." Don't underestimate the power of that coalition. Or the danger it poses to those of us who have no interest in being owned. On the other hand, never under-estimate the political utility in showing rednecks just what their wealthy Republican overlords really think of them.

So, Julie and I are flying down to Derby with BMIBaby (the low cost arm of British Midland).  And we go to check in online - and are told we can choose to pay an extra £4 to choose our seats, or take what we're given.

No problem, we think, we'll take what we're given - we don't care if we're at the front or the back.

But no - they assign one of us seats at the front of the aircraft and one at the back.

But we can still choose to pay - and looking at the system, we can choose two seats that are handily right next to each other.

So, despite there being pairs of seats, and despite us checking in online on a single form, they allocate the pair of us different seats, just so they can charge us an extra £4?

Oh - and to cap it all, there's no way to leave feedback online, or to email them.  The only way to talk to them is via a phone number that costs 65p/minute (i.e. $1/minute).

Fuck them.  I'm never flying with them again.  There's a certain amount of dickery I'm just not prepared to put up with.

(via theferrett)

http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/2008/05/26/the-undeniable-fact-and-it-inescapable-consequence/

The Undeniable Fact is that God does not show up in real life. The Inescapable Consequence of this Undeniable Fact is that anyone who wishes to talk about God can only speak of the things men say and think and feel and imagine.

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2085

"Listen. If Dawkins has emancipated people, freed them from the religious closet as it were, then all credit to him. Loath as I might be to compare Dawkins to Jesus Christ, in this he resembles the heroic figure in the New Testament who comes to sweep away all the fetishism and sickness and cynicism of the neurotic religionists."

Feministe has put up a Google map called "Strong Geography" where they are inviting people to add little stories of where and how they felt most strong. It's fascinating to read.

Most of what I do on Wikipedia is reverting vandalism, so I don't want to introduce any more of it. But sometimes I daydream:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/nb/nb.cgi/view/weblog/2009/07/17/0

Sure, it's usually true that a job interview is going well if the conversation goes swimmingly, with no 90-second interruptions for explanations. But not if I'm interviewing a Brit. What's a second-class degree? What's a "supervisory" in this context? And so on.

From today's IRC conversation, after I pointed people to IKEA tumbler hacking:

* sumanah kills the entire company's productivity; secretly working for [competitor]

Mmm, root access.

With thanks to my brother Mike.

Carlton is nice; rain is nice.

Part one: There are several interesting discussions currently going on on the Metacity blog, including the development of optional and experimental subsystems for CSS theming and window matching, and whether applications should be able to extend the window menu (so if you have Istanbul installed, you could add Screencast this window to all windows.) Hop over and add your two penn'orth.

Part two: I don't know any good content management systems. "Good" here means:

• easy for the end user to use (which is not usually me)
• without continual security holes
• not requiring MySQL
• if possible, not requiring PHP; Perl or Python would be lovely.

Moveable Type goes some way towards being "good", but my complete blog is so large that it takes three quarters of an hour to publish it in static mode, and the dynamic mode appears to require weird and clunky PHPisms. I have worked around this to some extent by using MT's rather nice dashboard, but turning off dynamic publishing, and writing a simple but fairly powerful mod_perl system called Plough which produces dynamic content by reading out of the database of a MT installation and running the results through Template Toolkit. Several of the sites I look after now use this system. I rather like it, but it's not really ideal: MT requires me to keep the static files around anyway, and they waste space.  Maybe there are better answers out there.

Part three: This blog's syndication is in a bit of a mess. It currently exists in four places:

• LiveJournal, here, where it started. Archives are here going back to 2001.
• Dreamwidth, here-- but not everything has been imported from LJ.
• GNOME Blogs, here-- generally the same content as LJ, but not entirely. This is what is syndicated to Planet GNOME.
• marnanel.org, here-- again, not exactly the same content, but all public entries from LJ have been imported (although the comments haven't). This is what is syndicated to Planet Collabora.  It's powered by Plough, of course.

I update the blog by writing it on Dreamwidth, letting Dreamwidth syndicate the content to LJ, and then copying it manually to GNOME Blogs and marnanel.org.  I'm okay with this as syndication, but I think it would be good if I had fewer things to update.  I'd quite like everything to end up on marnanel.org, for the increased control over styling and the googlejuice; I might perhaps write a script which updates marnanel.org and GNOME Blogs according to what's new in Dreamwidth's RSS.

Part four: I am still planning to write up GCDS, but this is not that post.

Part five: It has been mentioned that I don't blog about GNOME much any more, and that this is possibly not ideal for Planet GNOME.  This happens because almost all my GNOME hacking involves Metacity, and of course that goes on the Metacity blog; I only mention here what I've already written there.  If you have suggestions to fix this, please let me know!  (Before you ask, the Metacity blog can't go on Planet GNOME; it's not allowed.)

In news unrelated to blogging, my temperature has reached 99.6°F (38°C) and I feel rather awful. I hope I feel better tomorrow.

Just wanted to let everyone know, that a new version of MemcacheD has been released. We will be rolling this out to the memcache nodes during the week of July 20th to 24th. This should have very little impact on the stability of the website; however users may see a slight increase in load times as the cache is re-populated with entries.

The software has been tested and verified to be working just fine with the application; so we perceive this to be a very minimal risk in regards to updating, and the stability of the website.

Thanks...

In my post about the couple of days we recently spent in the San Francisco bay area, I enthused about the climbing gym our gracious hosts, parmonster and gentle_gamer took us to, Planet Granite, which was much larger than our "local" climbing gym at Harlow and which I really enoyed for its cleverly textured walls and fun, varied and inventive climbing routes. I went home lamenting not having a similar establishment nearby.

Well, the_local_echo has been doing some googling, and it turns out that the city that has pretty much everything, London, does indeed have such an establishment. What's more, it looks like this:



It's a Victorian former pumping station, but was built to look like a castle, in that way the Victorians liked to do. Appropriately enough, it's therefore called The Castle Climbing Centre, and it is huge. The photograph doesn't really convey the impact this building has as you approach it on an otherwise nondescript London inner suburban street. That tower at the back is 150 feet high, to give you an idea.

We really liked what we saw on their website, so Sylvia and I checked it out yesterday afternoon. We arrived there and expressed an interest in joining. The friendly reception staff asked if we had any experience, to which we replied that we were members at Harlow, and asked if we knew how to put a climbing harness on, tie-in, and correctly belay. We both replied that we did, were given consent/rules forms to read and sign, and on doing so were presented with our membership cards, or rather, we would have been presented with them were their printer working. Apparently we can pick them up next time.

With no further ceremony, we headed off to the ladies' changing rooms, geared up, and hit the climbing routes.

The first thing I noticed was that there was a lot of space dedicated to bouldering. There's no dedicated bouldering section at Harlow, and we could immediately see that The Castle had some on the round floor, and a mezzanine level entirely dedicated to bouldering (there's a floor plan here). It's not something I've got into at all yet, but perhaps this will encourage me to try. There were plenty of climbing routes dotted around, however, all on lovely textured walls, with cracks and arêtes, similar to the inventively sculptured walls we'd encountered in California, which promised much more interesting climbing that merely clambering around on what always look to me like oversized bits of chewing gum stuck to walls.

We climbed on the walls downstairs for a bit, and were pleased to note that the ratings seemed very consistent. I was able to consistently climb the 5 (Sports grade) (5.9 in YDS) routes with ease, and consistently got up the 5+ (5.10a) routes, but found them a little more "entertaining". Sylvia consistently found the same thing with the 4 (5.7) and 4+ (5.8) routes. The few 6a (5.10b) routes I tried were very tough and I tended to fall off them. This seemed to match my experience at Planet Granite, and has given me an appreciation for what people mean when they say the routes at Harlow are graded "on crack".

After a bit we decided to head upstairs to the cafe, to quench our thirst, and climbed the iron stairs up past the mezzanine bouldering area. When we entered the cafe area on the top floor, we were amazed to see a whole other floor full of climbing routes, both or lead climbing and top roping, which were even higher than the ones downstairs. Better still, we could sit on the sofas in the cafe area and watch people being impressive on the lead climbing wall, going up seemingly impossible routes and deploying their rope as they go (one day, one day)!

I think we spent about 3 hours doing climbing routes (they have 450 of them apparently, from 90 rope stations), before declaring ourselves exhausted, and trying a couple of simple bouldering routes to wind down. I'd not tried proper bouldering before, and I quickly got the impression that it requires some very different techniques from the climbing I've been accustomed to so far. I didn't get very far, not having started to develop any of the specific skills I needed, and after watching me repeatedly attempt, and fall off one relatively simple route, a muscular young man who'd been watching leapt up and decided to show Sylvia and me how it was done (how rugged!)

He fell off, adopted a bit of an "oh crap, there goes my chance of a shag" look, muttered something about being tired and wandered off, with apparently injured pride. I felt a bit sorry for him, but he did demonstrate some interesting bouldering moves which I'm keen to look at trying next time, so his efforts were not unappreciated.

Anyway, we've determined that the place is utterly awesome, and is very much like the gym in California that we so enjoyed. We'll definitely be back, especially since they have their "women with altitude" night on our regular climbing night, Monday, where they have female instructors around to help provide a female-friendly environment for sharing experience and advice.

They even have a little climbing wall for kids, which is handy because unlike Harlow, they have separate classrooms for teaching beginners and so don't have any routes on their main wall rated below a 4/5.7 (although there is one 4 rated route we found which was clearly intended to be a "starter" route, and was the only real example we found of a route which we both agreed was probably misrated.

The only question is, given it doesn't take much longer to get to by train, and is apparently considerably more awesome, will we be going to Harlow any more?

Originally posted at http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/204419.html - you can comment here or there.

If you have domain forwarding enabled, a user can take control of www.sitename.com. (note the trailing dot) and possibly get ahold of the users master cookie, as well as some other pretty vile things.

Adding $host =~ s/\.$//; on line 256 of cgi-bin/Apache/LiveJournal.pm should correct this issue.