The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20040401204848/http://www.kittywompus.com:80/macadamia/

March 06, 2004

Get Yer New Words for Old Here

Once again I'm fascinated by a list of OED appeals. General words this time rather than SF specifically. But surely one of my readers can antedate 'gaffer tape' to before 1988? They're looking for written evidence.

Thinking about my own childhood, surely there must be uses of 'Red Leicester' from before 1966? 'Fell off the back of a lorry' before 1973? 'Joined-up writing' before 1973? I mean, I was doing joined up writing in 1973, and I'm sure that's what I called it. 'Mushy peas' before 1975? 'Pass the parcel' before 1968? 'Snake-bite' before 1983?

And they're looking for any evidence of 'made up' (in the Scouse sense of 'be happy (with)'? Do you think they'd count my 2001 Christmas newsletter (.pdf)? Privately printed, in a run of 100 or so, no doubt including several of you.

Reading on in the OED site, I was fascinated by this little tidbit:

"hobbit — J. R. R. Tolkien modestly claimed not to have coined this word, although the Supplement to the OED credited him with the invention of it in the absence of further evidence. It seems, however, that Tolkien was right to be cautious. It has since turned up in one of those 19th-century folklore journals, in a list of long-forgotten words for fairy-folk or little people. It seems likely that Tolkien, with his interest in folklore, read this and subconsciously registered the name, reviving it many years later in his most famous character."

What this means, chaps, is that you can get on and sell those pervy hobbit fancier t-shirts -- it was a generic word for little people all along. When you get the Cease & Desist letter, you can go 'nyah nyah nyah' (another word the OED is looking to antedate...)

February 16, 2004

Never Accuse me of not being Political

Still unsure which Democratic presidential candidate is for you? Now you can see them all in 3D.

February 13, 2004

The Japanese are Weird

Cambrian QTs (pronounced 'cuties') is a new video game, where "the invertebrate fauna of the Cambrian are rendered as doe-eyed Japanese manga schoolgirls". For example, here's Anomalocaris:

doe-eyed Japanese schoolgirl with odd appendages

prehistoric creature

It's based on a manga, and you can see various bits of it in a web comic here. Originally I thought these were normal schoolgirls who have been bitten by radioactive trilobytes, but in fact I think the story is that they've been evolving in the South Pacific and are sworn to protect the tiny prehistoric creatures that surround them.

February 08, 2004

Floppy Disks

For some time we'd been eyeing the pile of floppy disks. Someone should go through them and extract anything useful, delete anything sensitive, and throw them all away. So now I have. This, for example, is something I wrote for rec.food.drink.beer, probably in 1994 or 1995, but, according to Google Groups, never posted.


The Return of the Prodigal Daughter...
or... Killing the Fatted Pig...
or...Alison at the Pigs Ear Beer Festival

The design on the Pigs Ear glasses was particularly fine this year; we took home our glasses from the Friday, and sold our glasses on the Saturday to Steve 'I could do with a few more pint glasses' Davies.

The festival had a theme of pigs, as always; which sounds like a good time to tell you about toes.

Apparently there are Latin names for the individual fingers, but not for the individual toes. However, suitable ones have been suggested:

Porcellus fori, porcellus domi, porcellus carnivori, porcellus non vorans, porcellus pleurans domum.

At any rate, we arrived at Stratford Town Hall at about 8:30 on Friday. (for the benefit of Americans and others, I feel I should point out that this is Stratford, East London, not Stratford-upon-Avon; no swans, bardic theme pubs or come-and-be-done-eries). There was a queue for the festival; it had hit its fire limit and they were counting people in and out. Oh, the perils of real ale suddenly becoming popular. Nevertheless, we made it inside eventually, and paid the CAMRA price of a pound. CAMRA membership is brilliant value for the hardened festival goer; the discounts on festival entry and the Good Beer Guide add up to far more than my membership over the year.

As usual, I headed straight for the tombola stall; the tombola prizes are not improving. I got a copy of some previous edition of the Real Ale Drinker's Almanac; a book that might be quite interesting if not for two things;

a) sorting the brewers region by region is quaint, and you can see why, but it's terribly hard to look anything up in the book; as it's basically a list of beers with tasting notes, I would expect most people to see an interesting beer and look it up to see what Roger Protz thinks of it. However, it's practically impossible to find anything in it.

b) the Guest Beer fetish has meant that beers are being reformulated or renamed or both at a rate of knots, and many beers you're likely to come across aren't in the Almanac, or at least aren't in the 1989 edition of the almanac.

Nevertheless, a useful book to pick up for only the price of an inordinate number of tombola tickets at 30p each, and a little discussion where I pointed out that I actually had won every other available book in some previous CAMRA tombola. (They do also have bar towels, glasses, beermats and, wonder of wonders, beer as prizes.)

We drank a good bit of beer. Unfortunately, after all this time the beers are dim in my memory, and all I have left is my tasting notes, which appear to be written in Swahili. I even threw out the programme while clearing up in a fit of zeal.

Later I found disks full of the .cam files that were produced by my first digital camera, the QV-10. I'd converted these to .jpg long since, but realised I had nothing on the PC to view the originals. The net failed me, at least in freeware (the .cam format went through several iterations, of which I need the earliest). Hours later, Steven asked, 'have you ever heard of a program called Graphic Converter?' Well, yes, of course; it was even bundled with my Powerbook (*sob*). And of course, it reads the files beautifully; better than when they were new.

January 30, 2004

Caution: Garageband may be Gateway Drug

I haven't spent any money yet, but it's only a matter of time. GarageBand is a cheap program (part of the £39 iLife) that makes you yearn for expensive things. I've delayed the process with some free workarounds. The rest of this post is Alison's brief guide to the things you can do with GarageBand and the stuff it makes you want.

The first thing you can do is build songs out of Apple's own loops. These come in two varieties; recordings of musicians (which you can transpose, retime and chop up), and software sequences (which you can transpose, retime, edit individual notes or groups of notes completely, and change the software instrument used). This is Lego music, but, hey, you can make cool things with Lego.

You'll want more loops. Make sure you've dragged the divider at the top of the loops section, because there are lots more loops hidden offscreen without a scrollbar. Turn off loop filtering, too; GarageBand can transpose all your loops so they don't need to be in key. But you may still want to Buy More Loops.

But pre-recorded loops won't really do. You can also record yourself singing or playing an acoustic instrument. Only one track at once, so you can't mic vocals and guitar and record both at the same time. You can use the inbuilt microphone for this, with surprisingly good results considering. But I guess a proper mic (and maybe also a pre-amp) are in my future. If you're like me, you'll also be struck by an urge to buy sheet music; I'm inclined to get the complete set of Purcell's catches, but you may want something quite different.

You can export projects to iTunes as an .aif, and convert them to loops using the Apple SDK. I haven't yet managed to find a loop I've made show up in the lists, but it's easy enough to drag them in from the Finder.

You can drag any AIFF file (which you can make from any of your music in iTunes by changing the encoding preferences) to your project and then sample to your heart's content. These samples are less versatile than any of the Apple Loops; you'll want to make sure that key and tempo match first.

You can also plug in an electric instrument. This is the one thing that I don't think you can do at all without at least an adapter, and people talk about pre-amps a lot. I don't own any electric instruments, though I faunch after a Bridge electric violin. GarageBand ships with a whole set of guitar amps, and there are more in the Jam Pack. I guess they'd work with fiddle, right? All academic for me at the moment.

Finally, you can use the software instruments. So you'll need a MIDI controller; and to prevent you from buying it straight away you can use MidiKeys, a beta that lets you use your Mac keyboard as a MIDI keyboard. This isn't remotely as good as having a proper MIDI keyboard, but it's a whole lot better than clicking on a tiny onscreen keyboard with a mouse. There's a slider for velocity, but you'll need to edit it afterwards.

Using MidiKeys and the amazing power of the Internet, I learnt a ton about drumming that had previously passed me by completely. I found Bill Powelson's site was a mine of information, in the sense that you really have to get in there, hunt through the dross and dig out the useful stuff with a pick. But there was plenty of useful stuff there, especially if you have no great desire to be a drummer but just want some tips for quickly producing four bars of plausible sounding rhythm.

Here you come up against one of the real limitations of GarageBand; it's hard to use it to tweak drum lines to sound only-just-not-quite-perfect, which unless you want only to produce techno, is what you need. Other, more expensive programs do this.

Guitar will be harder; the software instruments sound great, but my playing of them on MIDIkeys doesn't sound remotely like guitar. That was the point at which I diverted to drums, and I will return to guitar when I have a real keyboard to use.

The basic GarageBand doesn't include anything that sounds remotely like a fiddle; there is a violin in the Jam Pack, but I'm suspicious. Woodwinds are also pretty limited. If, on the other hand, you want really dodgy brain-frying synth noises, there are plenty. Martian Lounge, for example, which is a cantina.

GB only allows you to have one project open at a time, and there's no way to save snatches of MIDI for later use. (This contrasts with music, which you can save out as AIFF). The solution is to set up GB projects with names like '6/8 drum rhythms', containing lots of suitable bits of MIDI, and then cut and paste from one project to another, in the order 'copy', Open, 'new track', paste. That works, but is butt-ugly in a very 1.0 sort of way.

GB itself doesn't import or export MIDI, but Dent du Midi is a beta designed to address the lack of MIDI i/o support in GarageBand. It provides a perfectly serviceable workaround for the lack of MIDI import, so you can import MIDI files as a set of sequenced tracks. You then have to assign them each a software instrument in GB, but you've got the midi notes to play with. Export, however, is an unsolved problem at present; it doesn't export either to MIDI instruments or to .mid files. I don't believe you can cut-and-paste MIDI sequences to other MIDI software either (but I don't have any, so I can't check.)

If you use a lot of software instruments in the same piece of music, you may also need more RAM or a faster computer. I have 768Mb of RAM on the iMac, which seemed pointlessly much when I bought it. I'm sure GarageBand could soak up much more.

It may have more functionality that I haven't spotted yet; in which case, well, I'm sure I'll want to spend more money.

Diana Cult Over?

Following Diana's death, many UK pubs called the Prince of Wales suddenly renamed themselves the Princess of Wales; complete with signs with ugly portraits of Diana, or white roses, or whatever. One of these is in Villiers Street near where I work. But when I went past the other day the pub had had a makeover, and is sporting a new sign, which clearly depicts some other Princess of Wales.

Dowdy Victorian Princess on pub sign

I'm taking this as a sign that the population is a little embarrassed about the whole mass hysteria thing.

January 28, 2004

Low Humour

Today's had little to redeem it on the whole, but it was bracketed by two good laughs. I arrived at the station to see in the papers that on this huge news day, with Hutton leaking and the Government narrowly escaping the vote on top-up fees, a headline writer at the Daily Star had produced a little gem.

Today's Daily Star cover -- 'Jordan Silences Her Knockers'

And then Thette pointed me to http://www.cummingfirst.com, the website of the First United Methodist Church of Cumming, Georgia. They're dedicating their new organ at the weekend. As they suggest, "Make a Joyful Noise Unto the Lord".

January 26, 2004

Not Safe For Work

And, indeed, Not Safe For Anywhere Else Either. Having discovered that goatse.cx has lost its website following a complaint, I'm almost overwhelmed with the urge to link to the Prime Number Shitting Goatse.cx Man. You'll notice I haven't done so. That's because if you understand the antecedent references, you will immediately guess exactly what this site is like. And if by some strange chance you don't, You Really Do Not Want To Know. Honestly. Trust me on this.

So. Go look it up in Google if you like. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

We finally collapsed the dither function on a new coffee machine, though not without some added extra dither. The Bodum shop was selling the small version of the electric Santos, reasonably cheap. They also had a good price on the large one, but didn't have it in stock. So we bought the small one, and then spotted that the Starbucks right next door was selling the Barista Utopia for less than Bodum's reduced price on the identical large Santos. Some time later, we'd returned the small one, and bought the big one (and two grande skinny lattes with extra shots and two lollipops, which between them added 10% to the price of the machine).

This is an electric vacuum brewing machine. I've owned a Cona in the past; they make lovely coffee, but are far too troublesome first thing in the morning. Remember, we're the people who enumerate 'coffee disasters' for filter machines:


  1. forget to put water in
  2. forget to put coffee in
  3. forget to put filter in
  4. forget to put jug in
  5. forget to plug in
  6. forget to switch on
  7. put water in the place where the coffee goes
  8. put coffee in the place where the water goes
  9. put beans in the filter instead of ground
  10. leave the hopper out of the grinder so the coffee goes everywhere
  11. grind the coffee twice so the hopper overflows
  12. add the water twice so the machine overflows
  13. making coffee with half the water you intended too so it comes out too thick
  14. forgetting to empty old coffee out of the jug before you start
  15. leave machine turned on overnight

[EDIT: I forgot a whole pile the first time. And we've done each of these at least once, most several times.]

We have friends who use a Cona all the time, and who have an exciting history of coffee disasters far more spectacular than ours. After all, filter machines rarely implode, or fall off the stove spewing near-boiling coffee all over the kitchen.

The promise of the electric Santos is to deliver vacuum-brewed coffee with no more hassle than a filter coffee machine. The web offers mixed reviews, partly because of the original high price, and partly because this machine does not allow you to tinker the way that stovetop vacuum brewers do. But the biggest gripe is inconsistency of timing; and that's because this gadget is, at heart, an electric kettle -- and individual electric kettles vary considerably in the point at which they turn off. So you have to fiddle with your specific machine until you have the right combination of coffee quantity, grind, strength of vacuum seal and slope of kitchen counter. After which it's highly consistent.

Anyway, we've brewed two pots so far, and jolly nice they were too. It's superficially harder to clean than a filter machine -- but actually easier, because of all the bits in a filter machine that you can't get to and which eventually clog up your coffee. It does have that classic Cona taste, where you get all the flavour and no grit. And it is, unsurprisingly, great fun to watch.

Incidentally, the Rhyl SeaQuarium may be the single worst value tourist attraction we've ever visited. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest here; it has remarkably few fish, it majors in UK coastal fish, which tend towards the grey and dull, there's very little educational material on the walls, the roof leaks in wet weather, and it charges £5.50 for an adult and £4.50 for a child or pensioner (though Jonathan was free). Several of the exhibits were closed for winter, though there was no reduction in charges. It kept us entertained for 37 minutes, of which at least half I spent trying to take pictures of the dozen or so tropical saltwater fish while the kids moaned at me to hurry up. Don't go there. Next time we're in the area, we will try the Blue Planet Aquarium, one of the UK's largest, which is slightly more expensive but holds much more promise.

January 23, 2004

iSing

In the last week, GarageBand has become the Kittywompus equivalent of the Victorian piano. Each evening after dinner, the family gathers round the iMac to make very bad music.

I've always known that it would be quite handy to have some sequencing software. But it's all been either expensive, or hard to use, or both. Plus there's a problem that different programs do specific things well, but it's hard to find something that will cover all aspects of producing music for fun, and it's hard to tell what you need.

GarageBand is trivial by comparison. The interface is very easy to use; you drag loops into it and add MIDI tracks and recorded real instrument tracks to build up a song. When you're done, you can export it to iTunes (as an AIFF), where it appears in the library under your name.

The first night we had GarageBand, I recorded myself singing Cakes and Ale, which is a splendid three-part catch (round); I just recorded myself singing it once and offset it to produce the harmony. The following day, I moved onto a version of Summer Is Icumen In, with several layers of vocals and half a dozen recorders. Austin heard this; having just seen A Mighty Wind he thought that my recording felt authentically dreadful. I cearly have some work to do.

But still; GarageBand will allow enthusiastic amateurs to produce songs reminiscent of parodies of bad sixties folk music in only a few hours. Which is, well, quite something.

The third night, I went to the theatre, and arrived home to discover that while I was out, Steven & the kids had produced a weird ambient version of Hickory Dickory Dock, in the style of Wendy Cope in the style of TS Eliot, with vocals from all three of them and supporting weird ethnic percussion sounds as well as some of the Apple Loops. None of them can sing, play an instrument, or read music. But it didn't stop them having a whale of a time with GarageBand.

Even with no previous experience, I quickly discovered some of the program's limitations. For example, it allows you to work in any of a dozen different time signatures (including fives!). But remember those 1000 loops? 6 are 3/4 time (of which only two are actually 3-beat loops). A couple are 2/4 or 2/2. The rest are 4/4. So, if I'd like, say, to sing along to a drum in 6/8 time, I'd better find some other loops, or record my own. Luckily we have a house full of likely percussive items.

Apple reckoned that their target audience wouldn't want to produce their own loops, using Apple's inbuilt loops instead. But of course I'm keen to produce loops from Jonathan's enthusiastic playing of the seed rattle and other instruments we picked up at Strawberry Fair; there's an SDK to do this.

On the whole, GarageBand is just about the most fun ever. If you've ever played an instrument, or wanted to fiddle about with loops, or even like singing in the bath, you'll have a whale of a time.