Dom Davis (The Blog)

I am at times what you could charitably call “softly spoken”. The meaner among you might claim I mumble. It comes from not wanting to be a loud oaf and the premise that I can hear what I’m saying perfectly well. This generally happens in public places and when I’m feeling self conscious.

Sadly, as previously mentioned, I feel self conscious when talking to a phone. Couple this we me starting to speak to early for Siri and the fact that it’s not 100% accurate and you start getting some interesting responses.

The Zozo absolutely loves Siri, although not as a personal assistant. No, to her Siri is a constant source of amusement. “Remind me to pack Colin at 7am tomorrow morning” [Colin being my current Lovefilm DVD rental] resulted in a 7am reminder for “Meatpacker Colin”. “Cool, heading home” has been turned into “Call Ashton” and when it did recognise what I said I wasn’t after “T” being added to be shopping list. What The Zozo finds most hysterical though is the numerous occasions where I say something to the phone and it simply goes “I’m sorry Dom, I did not understand you”. it’s enough to give a person a complex.

It makes you wonder why you don’t get similar mishaps happening in the future. You never get captain Kirk going “Shields up! Red alert” and the computer responding “Shields are now up, but I could not find ‘Alert’ in your reading list to mark it as read. Should I order it from the Amazon Kindle store?”. The closest you get it HAL refusing to open the pod bay doors and while that was an AI deliberately pretending not to hear one can’t help but wonder if that kind of intelligence doesn’t already exist in computers given how bloody minded they can be.

To give you an idea of how badly Siri and I cope together I’ll try typing, dictating and then Dictating With My Deliberate Enunciated Voice which is like my best handwriting for speech and you can compare the 3. Obviously this will need to be done at home where I can be slightly less self conscious as there is no way in hell that’s happening on a train

My Most Excellent Man¹ has written a book about his moving away from the city and living on a small holding² with what seems to be an inordinate amount of goats, sheep, pigs and sundry other beasties, most of which fall under the category of ‘lunch’³. Personally I think he is insane and although he will [eventually] have a beautiful barn conversion it will have involved living on a building site for years, cost him a fortune and seen him doing something like 4 hour round commutes to work. To top it off he and his wife are talking about selling the place when they’re done and starting again. Never understood the whole ‘build a dream home then sell it instead of living in it’ thing. Still, he seems to be happy.

Anyway, returning back to the book, when I found out about it I offered to read through it and make any corrections I deemed necessary. This was a purely selfish act you understand, since I wanted to make sure I featured heavily in the tale, preferably as some kind of hero figure. It’s a good thing I did too, I had to make some serious edits to even get myself included and even then I’m just a bit part. I also had to rectify his serious aversion to the full stop. Now, I know I’m a bit free and easy with punctuation and I abuse the poor comma something chronic but none of you pay to be here and, more importantly, I’m not submitting this to professional editors for review who would, truth be told, rip this poor blogs to shreds for being inconsistent, poorly written and riddled with typos⁵. So, for what seemed like eons (editing a book takes waaaaaaay longer than just reading it) I took my virtual red pen on my laptop and crossed out… well, not quite most of the book, but a large chunk of it.

We’re now on round 2 (actually, he’s probably on round 3 by now and talking to publishers, I’ve been sat on the revision for a while definitely meaning to look at it) but this time I have a new weapon: my iPad. I’ve got a PDF editing program and the PDFs of the book uploaded onto it so I can now sit on the train and edit away without need for laptop or table. This should greatly improve the speed at which I get through things as its term time and table seats are harder to get on the homeward leg of the journey.

But that’s not the only new and exciting thing. I’ve now got tethering on my phone. What this means is that I can connect to the internetwebs while on the move on both my laptop and my iPad by connecting them to the phone which means, in theory, you’ll be seeing this and future posts arriving before I’ve got to the office⁶. All very exciting.

But even that isn’t everything. The arrival of tethering on my contract is due to a change in contract. The change in contract is due to a new contract being taken out and the new contract is due to a new phone. Yup, admittedly a little late than, well, pretty much everyone else I know, I shall be getting an iPhone 4S which should be delivered to the office some time today. It’s all very exciting and I’m looking forward to playing with the features on the way home.

All of which leads me to the point of this post which is, in point of fact, simply a long winded way of explaining that I won’t actually be starting on the book edit until tomorrow, despite promising to start today⁷. Sorry

¹ The plate of sashimi that rivalled Ben Nevis in size and height served between 2 on my stag do elevated him from simply being ‘Best’.
² Where I am lead to believe that he holds small things.
³ And a very nice lunch and/or⁴ dinner and/or breakfast some of them have made.
⁴ My inner geek wants to replace and/or with logical OR ( || ) given it’s the same truth table as and/or. My inner geek will be told to shush, although its retaliating by now wanting to include XOR or XNOR in the text somewhere. One can only apologise for it.
⁵ Nono, it’s true, I can handle the criticism.
⁶ Although to be fair I won’t be uploading anything on the walk to work as the iPad is bit unwieldy when on the move and gets shoved in the bag while I use the phone instead so if I’m not ready to post as we pull in, or if I’m doing something else, you’re still going to have to wait. That’s just life I’m afraid.
⁷ Yes, I could have written a shorter post and got on with things this morning, but seriously, where is the fun in that?

I didn’t see Pinky this morning. I’m worried. I’m waiting for a text…

…so as not to be gloomy let us, intend, concentrate on the weather. I have my coat on and a long sleeved shirt. My jumper is in my bag. I may put it on later. Yes, the marvellous winter air is closing in on us… and more importantly on the wasps in the loft.

Their nest can’t be too big. I don’t recall seeing any wasps a couple of weeks ago so I think a queen has got confused and started work too late. That is my hope. Her, and her children are now doomed either way. Meanwhile, for the first time ever, I pray for frost, snow and blizzards and for freezing, wasp killing weather.

And no, I will not get over it.

I woke this morning to the discovery that Steve Jobs had died. This sad news was delivered to me via email on my iPhone and confirmed by the BBC News app on the same device. As President Obama said “Much of the world learned of his passing on a device he created”. Not something many people can claim.

I’m also waiting to hear about the fate of Princess, one of our two remaining mice. She was ill last night and I haven’t seen her since about 7pm. I worry she too has passed and only Pinky remains. Today may turn out to be a sucky day.

Despite the rather pleasant warmth¹ of late it’s hard to avoid the inescapable truth: the days are getting shorter. I am no longer getting up in daylight, no longer leaving the house in glorious sunshine and no longer getting home to bright afternoons. Dawn is just breaking when I get up now. The sunrise, pretty though it is, hampers my view of the screen on the train out and the sunset does the same on the train home. Soon the warmth will go and the cold will come.

Ordinarily I would lament this. I’d be happy for the current weather to continue for a long time, but we have to think of the bigger picture. We need the cold. We need sharp frosts. We need plunging temperatures and we need the wasps in the roof to die!

That is correct. Such is my hatred of wasps that I am willing to accept arctic temperatures with a smile on my face and nary a complaint crossing my lips if I could be sure that the evil buzzing bastards slowly, and painfully froze to death so I could go and collect their little carcasses and their home and all their unborn young and burn them, burn them all in the fiery furnace that is our wood burning stove. Then I will put their ashen remains into the bin where they will be buried in a landfill along with the rest of humanities detritus and cast offs, there to rot for the rest of eternity in the putrid stench of decomposing rubbish.

Did I mention I don’t like wasps?

¹ The views on the current weather being nice are my own personal views and may not reflect that of The Zozo or any other characters in this blog.

Due to one thing or another I’ve not really been to the gym to work out (I’ve been swimming a couple of times) since I started the All Kebab diet. The gym houses the Official Scales which I use to weigh myself, mainly because the scales I have at home, despite being very flash, don’t seem to want to give a consistent measurement. Personally I blame the fact the floorboards move thus not giving them a stable base but this doesn’t stop them from being utterly useless.

Today will be the first official weigh in. Now I did manage to have a quick workout and weigh in a few days after starting and the initial results were promising, but also due to water loss. If the All Kebab diet really does work then the needle should have shifted so it’s now closer to the 13 then it is to the 14 despite the lack of regular rigorous exercise and the consumption of a lot of bad foods during lunch today.

If the looseness of the jeans are anything to go by then the result should be rather promising

So for a while now I’ve been on the lookout for a track I’d head at Slimelight a few times. Sadly I had no clue who it was by, no idea what it was called, and rather got the lyrics wrong when hunting for it. To be fair it is in German and I had thought it was called ‘Stein Um Stein’, which to be fair is the name of a Rammstein track I have. A not so recent compilation purchase which took several weeks to get to me yielded excellent news. There, on the track listing, was a track by ‘And One’ called Steine Sinde Steine (Stones are Stones). Jackpot. Sadly it was a live version, however, 60 seconds later and I had the studio version downloaded an on my iPhone.

So I present for your listening pleasure, And One, Steine Sinde Steine:

Steine Sinde Steine

Lyrics (including translation) can be found here. Enjoy

I used to suffer from kidney stones. At it’s peak I was having one a year. At first I was put on a calcium restricted diet. This didn’t achieve much, save for making my bones brittle.

I was then told that I didn’t need to restrict my calcium as it turns out very few people have calcium only kidney stones and it’s actually ureic acid that’s at fault. No, I should cut down on the protein I eat.

Admittedly that did appear to work. But, I also pretty much quit drinking and, probably more importantly, quit smoking a little later.

I’m now reading a book that seems to indicate that the state of nutritional science is stuck in the 1970s, is riddled with misconceptions and that we were, in fact, more clued up in these areas in the 1940′s than we are now.

I started reading the book out of interest and a desire to lose weight. If what it says is true (and it looks like I’m going to be reading some very dry medical papers on the matter) my current diet is also all wrong and turning it on it’s head will help me shift some weight, prevent kidney stones and stop the gout.

The reason I’m going to be doing more in depth research is that simply sucking it and seeing could be incredibly bloody painful if I’m wrong.

This morning as I walked to the train station I accidentally banged my arm against one of the bollards in the Morrisons car park. I didn’t feel much as my watch took the brunt of the blow. Sadly this also meant the watch had taken the brunt of the blow. There is now an ugly scratch on the face. Not happy.

In the late 90 I was working in a support team for one of the large investment banks. The nature of the job involved having 3 computes on my desk: A Windows NT box, which I hated; a Sun Workstation which, while powerful, was looking a bit antiquated compared to what Linux machines could do; and a black NeXT which was woefully underpowered and my absolute favourite machine for many years afterwards. My love of the NeXT was down to the operating system, NeXT Step. It was just light years ahead of anything and an absolute joy to use.

It’s actually this machine that started my rabid fanboiism with Apple because NeXT was the brainchild of none other than Steve and, when he returned to Apple, it morphed into OSX.

At the time the only Apple I had was a Mac Cube, a gorgeous bit of kit hamstrung by the fact it was running System 9. System 9 was shit. It was old, clunky and crashed lots. It made you yearn for Windows, it was that bad. Then came OSX and it was NeXT on steroids. Over the next few years I replaced every single machine I owned with macs.

OSX has undergone a number of iterations since it first came out and I’ve eagerly anticipated each release, buying it working hours of it coming out (seconds in the case of Lion) and every single release has just made things better… until Lion. The fact is I just don’t like it. Now, I’m hoping that much of this dislike is lack of familiarity but some of it is rooted in the direction OSX seems to be going in. I’ve put upgrade plans for my big machine on hold for now and I worry that, if this trend continues, the next iteration of OSX could lead me to start having a crisis of faith :S