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All working again. Move along, nothing to see.

(Anyone know how to fool HTML into showing tags as text?)

High life

We spent most of the morning looking at flats - including several in K2. It’s the first time I’ve ever paid it much attention, let alone actually been inside. The views are pretty spectacular - especially the marketing suite, which is up on the 15th floor and looks out over the city centre and to the south. It’s got two bedrooms and is on the market for 270k, which just goes to show how the property market in Leeds has lost its marbles. It’s a lot of money for a view.

As far as the rest of it was concerned, I was pretty underwhelmed. The two bed flats in our price range were - to put it bluntly - pokey. 684 square feet doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not by the time that you remove the hallway from the equation - that’s 684 square feet of floorspace, not usable living area. The furnishings ranged from “show set at Ikea” to “Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen on acid”, including the most disgusting diarrhoea-brown leather sofa I’ve ever seen. It might have looked good in the style magazines, but in real life it was just hideous. So all in all, K2 was a bit of a let-down, although I did like the idea of the car lifts down in the basement - it’s basically like a bookshelf-cum-rotisserie for cars. You drive into your slot and then the whole thing sinks down into the floor to make space for another two on top.

All of which means that we’re no further on, although I keep telling myself that September 23rd is a long time off, and panicking about housing at this stage is premature. For a while I felt like I could actually care less about this place, but once you start to look at the alternatives, it’s actually quite a good place.

Test post

Bugger. Problems posting from wBloggar and Zempt.

Insomnia

Insomnia strikes again. So I’ve been sitting at the keyboard playing Tranquility for a while, with the balcony door wide open and the sound of the river in the background. Very relaxing - I’ll miss it…

Politics and poisson distributions

Another day at the Large Retailer, trying to make headway on the project. Some progress, but if change in this organisation is like turning around a supertanker, then trying to get hold of the people you need to talk to in order to get the information that you need is like wading through the treacle that the supertanker is sailing through. While having nicely delineated channels of communications and business account relationships makes for great organograms, it doesn’t half get in the way when you simply want to cut across the silos in the business and get answers from people…

In the periods between meetings I started downloading some of the background papers - the ones with all the equations. Suddenly a highly-quantitative project doesn’t start to look like quite such a good idea - I can’t remember ever having met a Poisson distribution before, let alone understanding it. Something tells me I’ll know a whole lot more about them by the time this has all finished…

One of the more unusual places to blog…

…is the waiting room of an orthodentist. And having a laptop handy, and waiting for someone to finish having their impressions taken - or whatever it is that orthodentists do the first time you visit them - it seems like the logical way to pass the time. It’s another first, too - the first time I’ve ever seen a dentist-in-the-round - it’s a huge room, maybe 150ft square, with a raised circular brick plinth in the middle, walled round with screens and the kind of glass bricks I associate with public conveniences. Behind which all the dentistry takes place - although it looks more like an upmarket hair salon than a medical establishment. I’d have taken a picture, but there are blood-curdling exhortations that all mobile phones must be switched off at all times. A lingering fear of strict women in white coats means that I’m obeying them to the letter.

ID cards

Not something I find myself doing often (and I’m not about to make a habit of it, mind you) is agreeing with a Daily Telegraph leader column. In this case, however, we see eye-to-eye - identity cards are a bad idea, and none of the specious arguments that have been put forward in their favour come anywhere close to convincing me.

In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if in fact David Blunkett is rather more right-wing than Michael Howard - he certainly seems to spend a disproportionate amount of time cheerfully whittling away at privacy in the name of “security”. And seeing him stand on a podium alongside John Ashcroft a few months ago was worrying - given that he appears to be using the US as something of a role model.

Tranquility

I’m not generally a fan of online games - the learning curve always seems to be too steep to make the payoff worthwhile, at least to my hair-trigger attention span. This on the other hand is genuinely different - you use your mouse to bounce off platforms in a 3D wireframe world, accompanied by tinkly new age music. The theory is that it’s relaxing and induces a state of tranquility - I can’t vouch for that, but it’s an excellent timewaster…

The Thunderer thunders about blogs

So, according to Oliver James I’m lonely, narcissistic and in need of contact with others. Probably, although I don’t see what it is about blogs that gets the professional pundits so worked up. There seems to be three distinct schools of thought - the Grauniad with its “change the world as we know it approach”; the Times and the “ho, ho, ho, look at all those ever-so-slightly amusing little people” position and the remainder with the “but it’s terrible, what about the effect on journalistic quality?” attitude. What about the quality? Since when was the Daily Mail a guarantee of high journalistic standards, let alone any of the other “shit, need to fill a half-page, get Raj Persaud on the phone”-style organs?

The web is what the web has always been - 99.9% completely obscure of which at least 50% is total crap, and the remaining 0.1% completely dependent on your outlook and political persuasion - probably comprising Amazon and the news organisation of your choice. Weblogs aren’t any different to homepages were five years ago - mainly crap, some indifferent and a handful downright insightfully brilliant. Which one this falls into is a matter of preference, natch.

Elf sex

Bit of a Tolkein theme this evening - everything you ever wanted to know about elf sex ( via Muxway)