Anotherblog

In Mandelieu

Mandelieu is pronounced Mundelyuh, and should be pronounced with pursed lips for that lovely round quality that you so often get in French.

I’m in Mandelieu. I could write a great deal about how I got here, and how jet-lagged I am, and how amazingly good the weather is, and that the Technical Plenary has been quite interesting so far and has hardly caused me to drift off at all, but the simple fact is that I am writing a weblog entry while paying only light attention at the moment, which I guess gives a certain indication that not everything at the plenary is totally relevent to my or svg’s interest.

Anyway. I’m here, it’s nice, the hotel is lovely and I have an ocean view, and the many different working group people are pleasant and as eccentric as you would hope. It’s a characterama! Also, there’s a fantastic castle down by the water. I toured it yesterday with Doug S. and we were amazed at just how eccentric the owners were. It felt as though we were walking through a Call of Cthulhu module, the bit just before the hideous monster leaps out…

Archery & France

This morning: 302 (50, 53, 47, 52, 51, 49) and 315 (57!, 54, 52, 50,51, 51). The 57 was X, 10, 10, 10, 9, 8.

It was a very good morning. As I thought, the shoelace thing holding the bow really helped. Even so, I think it might be a while before I crack 315. That 57 (my best score at the 30m range) was lovely but my next best score is still 54.

Interestingly, I went on to a smaller target on the 30m range, and for some reason I shot even better to get some fairly similar scores.

And now I’m off to France. I’m going to take my video camera this time. I’ve already agreed to give a lunchtime seminar on the technical plenary, you see.

Lessons learned today:

1. Experience does not, apparently, teach me anything about avoiding bad things (like talking in front of lots of people).
2. Archery has a good learning curve, much like well-designed computer games.

FF mention on PartiallyClips

Film Forensics got a nice mention in the news section of Partially Clips today.

I *am* considering paying for FF reviews (though I haven’t done so yet) from skilled writers - Winston and I just don’t have the time to regularly update it, and I want to expand the scope a little and try and get more readers by having regular content. I’ve decided FF can have a little bit of a budget - say, $50 a week or so, which means that my pay rate is likely to be around $50 an article most of the time. I’m trying to aim at writers I admire - the Partially Clips guy is fantastically analytical and would do great FFs, and I’m going to try Steve Notley and I’ve asked David Morgan-Mar (all webcomic guys so far, for some reason).

Dodgy idea? Throwing money away, given that I have no conceivable way of making money from FF yet? I dunno, but it’s something I want to succeed, by which I mean: have a bunch of people who read it and like it. And it could be fun to be an editor for a bit.

Weekend

Just to fill in on the weekend activities - I ostensibly worked on the crypto talk, but mostly just did a bunch of kukoru and watched films about crypto - Mercury Rising, Enigma, War Games, and The Net. I couldn’t find Sneakers, Hackers or Swordfish in the video store, which is probably just as well.

Went to archery on Saturday and shot a couple of rounds (298, 304) then tied a shoelace to my fingers, as per my instructor’s instructions. The idea is, the hand (not the arm, though) holding the bow should be relaxed. If it’s too relaxed, you’ll drop the bow once you’ve fired the shot, so you normally have to grip the bow once you’ve fired. This can lead to bad shots, because it’s one more thing to think about, or you grab too early, or hold the bow too firmly in the first place, etc. So, instead, you tie a shoelace between your thumb and forefinger. You let the bow fall once you’ve fired, but the shoelace holds it in your hand. If you ever watch archery on TV, you’ll see that once the archer fires, the bow will tip forward. That’s what I was practicing, and it seemed very effective indeed - once I’d gotten used to the idea of it, my shots were noticably straighter and more accurate than when I had been scoring.

Jon and Kate came over on Saturday, ’cause Jon was leaving overseas on Sunday. More music, and Lost, and fun. It’s such a regular thing now, it’s almost something we take for granted, but I don’t think I’ve ever had such a regular meeting with friends in years, not since D&D with Chris & Amanda & Andrea, or squash with Ted.

Oh, and Paul came over on Sunday. He’d just seen Serenity, but he is such an alternative kinda guy he had no idea there was a TV series that had preceded it. I lent him the firefly boxed set.

(Has it really come to this? Is my weblog now mainly to remind me what I’ve lent to people? Oh well, at least it’s useful.)

Birthday, Cryptography

It’s been a busy and stressful week. Happily, Monday was neither busy nor stressful: I turned 36 (1^2 * 2^2 * 3^2, and one of my favorite numbers) and wandered around town looking at things I could buy for my birthday. I ended up choosing a cheap mobile phone (which has already broken - the screen doesn’t display properly) to replace my lost mobile, and a fedora. Anna got me a t-shirt that said “Blah blah blah blah blah” on the front and “Blah blah” on the back. I’m not sure what message she’s sending me, but I like the t-shirt and will wear it a lot.

I bought the fedora mainly because I wanted to do some filming for my cryptography talk and needed a secret-spy kinda look, but I like the look of it anyway (I’m ignoring my usual instinctive wince at anything involving fashion.) When winter comes, I may wear it a bit more regularly, though it probably requires a waistcoat.

Actually, I did quite a lot of work on the cryptography talk on Monday, but it didn’t get really stressful until Tuesday when it was all looking a bit dodgy and far-from-ready. In grade 9, I gave a talk on binary numbers that was memorably bad - I didn’t prepare enough, I tried writing things on the blackboard, I stuttered and mumbled and was instantly branded a total geek for the rest of high-school. “Binary numbers” became an instant giggling point for the girls in my class. I’m not saying the total-geek branding wouldn’t have happened anyway - I am - but for a long time I rather overzealously prepared talks, and tried not to be too ambitious.

This talk, I was very ambitious. I have my theories about the learning process, and I wanted the talk to be something of a demonstration of these theories. I wanted to try out doing the entire talk using iMovie instead of powerpoint. I wanted to have some dialogue and interaction between the characters in the movie and me as presenter, because I’ve never seen that kind of thing done effectively, and I figured I could do it. Also, I wanted to give the kind of presentation on cryptography that I’d have benefited from, when I first joined Security Domain.

When it came to Tuesday, I had to cull a couple of these things, ’cause I wasn’t nearly well-prepared enough. The dialogue/interaction thing will have to wait for another day, though I still think I can do it well. Still, I figured I could do the rest of it if I did without some sleep. So at lunchtime on Tuesday I rounded up some of my workmates and filmed the story of Alice the baker, and Bob the director of the orphanarium. Alice wants to give her recipes for delicious fruit-flavoured lamingtons to Bob, so that he can feed his discerning orphans, but she doesn’t want Eve, the evil lamington factory owner (wearing a trenchcoat and fedora and poised with a notebook), to get her grubby hands on the recipes. We filmed for about an hour, and I got the shots I wanted.

That evening, I realised I had made a big mistake. My video camera (a sony trv900) is developing problems with its sound - it records sound perfectly well when you use an external microphone (which I do most of the time) but when you use the internal mike, the levels are too low to be useful. I had taken my video camera to work, but I forgot the mike. No matter: we have many canon video cameras at work, so we just used one of the really cool xl1s. However, I used a tape that I had “formatted” with the sony - I had prerecorded over the entire tape, so that it had a timestamp all the way through. I’m not sure whether that was *the* problem, but there certainly was *a* problem when it came time to capture the footage onto the computer: both the sound and video were glitchy and stuttery and full of weird artifacts. Unusable, in fact.

I retreated to the bedroom and did some kukoru for a while. It was now 8:00pm and although I had a bunch of notes, I had, essentially, no presentation yet.

The footage wasn’t too bad when I played it back on the video camera itself, if you ignored the bad sound. But it wouldn’t capture properly. So, I played the footage on the TV using the mini DV deck, pointed the video camera at the TV with a fresh tape, and recorded the footage straight from the TV.

It worked. In fact, it wasn’t even all that bad - if you squinted closely you could see the reflection of the video camera from the TV screen, and the resolution and colour were a bit rougher, but there wasn’t any flickering.

As it happened, I was also trying to capture footage from a couple of DVDs, and was having a hard time with that, too. The process of coverting the DVD to a movie file was proving extremely tedious, and then importing the movie file into iMovie was just as tedious again. Since I already had the camera pointing at the TV, and I had already logged all the footage I wanted to capture for “Enigma” and “Mercury Rising”, I went the low-tech option again, and recorded all the footage off the TV again. It took mere minutes, and there it was, all the footage imported into iMovie at the cost of a bit of resolution and colour. Bloody hell.

So, the remainder of the night was putting footage together to tell the story of Alice and Bob, and writing up extensive notes, because there was no way in hell I was going to improvise this talk. I got up early on Wednesday morning and kept going until I had to get to work, and I even did the rendering of the movie in the background while I was at work. It hit about 11:00am, and suddenly all the stress evaporated. Why was I caring? I was surrounded by friendly geeks, and I knew the subject well. There was no way it was going to be a disaster. Sure, the second half of the talk would be a bit more talky and less showy - I couldn’t work out what footage to shoot for the explanation of public-key cryptography in time - but it would be fairly reasonable.

And so, when it came time to give the talk I was perfectly calm and happy and not at all stressed, and it went down very well, I thought. There were a lot of interesting questions, which I knew the answers to (or at least had opinions on.) A couple of people came up afterwards and said they had learned a bunch from the talk.

Yesterday afternoon was a good afternoon.

Lessons learned:

1. I really should prepare more, but only the stress of imminant failure propels me to do the necessary work. I therefore need a new brain.
2. Low-tech hacks feel ugly and stupid, but work better and faster.
3. Cheap mobile phones can be kinda dodgy.

Sick day

Yeah, it turns out I was feeling sick. So I took a day off yesterday and lay in bed a lot, and now I’m feeling better.

Archery on Wednesday: 294, 298.

I’m still falling behind on every single activity I’m trying to do. Most worrying: the Cryptography talk. Of course, that’s because it’s public speaking, and because I have ambitions to do a bit of short film to accompany it, illustrating some common protocol attacks.

Alfa

Lima Foxtrot
India Mike Oscar X-Ray Tango Romeo
November Delta Kilo Echo Sierra Charlie Romeo Yankee Golf
Victor Bravo Hotel
Continue reading Alfa…

Down

If I actually ever posted anything entertaining, I’d apologise for not posting anything entertaining right now, but I’m feeling down. Unmotivated, somewhat overwhelmed, very procrastinatey, a little ill, listless (except for this list), slow, full of niggling aches and tiredness, complainy, passive, aggressive, guilty, melodramatic, thick, and a tiny bit defeatist.

Until I finished that sentence! Now I feel fine. All it took was for me to write it all down [1] and now I’m ready to get back into things: which is, continuing to write down lists.

Recent activities: archery (293, 289, took along Anna’s brother George), music with Anna & Jon & Kate (continued recording our new song, laid down the drums and bass and rhythm guitar), Battlestar Galactica & Lost, “We Love Katamari”, continued Magic Invented Draft (8-1 games so far), BBQ for John & Claire’s housewarming, BBQ for Alistair & Helen’s engagement, squash last Thursday (4-1 to Ian including agonising loss when I was leading by very much indeed), golf on Saturday morning with Owen (59, Owen got 60, so it was the first time I’ve beaten him. Notable for me starting very well, and then completely losing it in the second half and getting very cross, but trying to be entertainingly cross rather than just unpleasant.)

Recent procrastinations: Rabbit Blog, “We Love Katamari”, Magic: The Distraction, anotherblog, sudoku, kukoru, sleep, hiding.

[1] This is a lie. I’m still down, but I’m keeping up appearances just dandily, don’t you think?

A sporty week

Archery on Wednesday and Sunday, squash yesterday, and golf tomorrow morning. All my sporting needs are currently catered for. Next up: video. I want to show the amazing cross-handed grip of the lacrosse player, and I’d like to make a start on the video delay-line project this weekend, and see if I can apply it to archery and/or golf.

If, of course, I can be arsed.

Archery high score

I got my highest 30m round ever, this morning: 52, 48, 50, 53, 54, 48 (305). My arms are still getting tired and wobbly, but I can really feel the improvement in strength since I got the bow last Wednesday. Now I’m impatient for Saturday to come along.