Having now finished my job at the ADC, I’ve had time to put it together. I present my python Lie Generator. It’s not much, but it was fun to make. It honed my regex skills rather a lot (DWOL doesn’t include any kind of API), and is also able to deal gracefully with internet-connectivity problems. It works with Python 3 only (due to changes to their urllib library) and must be called from the command line. I might someday work it into the website in some fashion.

I should probably reiterate what’s stated in the help text: copyright for all lies remains as stated on DWOL.

This is mainly due to my current work-related business, which I hope to reduce at least a little in the autumn; I’ve learnt huge amounts in this job, but none of it has been cerebral in the way that my degree was. That’s a good thing – but I want to get back to academic thinking, with a bit of an urge to go in the philosophy direction. My job’s focus on practical skills has left most of my mind not-quite-caring for long enough to write stuff down if the topic isn’t in the here and now.

Anyway, I’ve got this far already: what I was thinking about this morning was “aims” – for Life, I mean. Goals, objectives, targets, dreams… that stuff. I don’t really know what mine is, yet, which is fine – my middle-term plan is to take enough variety of jobs/activities that I can narrow it down.

It occurred to me, though, that there aren’t really all that many aims to pick from. We (can) all have short-, middle- and long-term aims: but as far as I can tell, these define each other in latter-to-former order. I suspect that everyone has more trouble defining their long-term aim(s), but actually, you can get an idea of the shape of them from the nature of the middle-term aims. Likewise, the (usually well-defined) short-term aims help to define the middle-term aims.

So, what if each of us, psychologically, is basically acting on a single meta-long-term aim all the time? The nature and style of all sub-aims alludes to that one meta-aim. In which case, what possible meta-aims are there? After much pondering, I think there might just be two: personal happiness (in a ‘nirvana’ sense of the word), and group happiness.

An aside: “group” would have to be defined as “all the other entities in one’s sphere of conciousness that the individual perceives as having an ability to affect the state of, to some extent, directly or indirectly”. So for most of us, “group” would just be immediate family and friends, coworkers, etc – people who we have contact with. Some people realise that they actually are able to affect entities that are more socially-distant – be it a local charity or organisation, a nearby community facing some problem due to obfuscating politicians, “the environment” locally or generally, or “the starving masses in Africa”. The ones who realise that they can affect these latter categories are the ones who go to rallies, demonstrations, join Amnesty, join Greenpeace, or organise huge rock gigs to raise money…

Back to the main argument. I postulate two primary meta-aims: achieving personal happiness; and achieving group happiness. Is this really a surprising conclusion? Probably not, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I can imagine somebody arguing that “getting rich” would be a meta-aim, but it’s really not: money is (or can be) a means to happiness, either of oneself, of ones’ group, or of both.

Another aside: it occurred about here that we as a developed society have a huge problem distinguishing money as “a common unit of worth for ensuring equal exchange of goods and services” from money as “a bringer of good things”. It is, in fact, only the former: your desires and decisions are what bring the good things. I might expand on this another day.

Of course, defining either as “complete” is tricky: but perhaps they’re more of a path to be travelled, rather than a destination. Continual, gradual increase in happiness for as much of one’s lifetime as possible. Everyone wants to die happy, right? But do they do that because they ended up sitting on a great pile of money and possessions, having had many huge meals, wild experiences, and memorable encounters; or do they do it because they know that, thanks to them, fewer kids are dying on a far-away continent?

It should definitely be noted that raising the happiness of oneself is also an effort towards raising group happiness, provided it doesn’t actively detract from other people’s personal happiness in the process (e.g. theft). Earning money in order to gain experiences, meet new people, and fix happy memories is fine: other people are probably going to come off better too, or at least not worse. Earning money by theft, of course, would be a different matter. But “group-happy” people will, and should, do things for themselves too – not to do so would in most cases make them less motivated. The difference is just that they see the point in helping others, as well as themselves, whereas a “self-happy” person wouldn’t do, necessarily.

I should also make clear that “self-happy” people are not necessarily bad, evil criminal people. I think there are plenty of perfectly well-balanced people who come into the “self-happy” category, but still go about being useful members of society because it helps them achieve their goal in a simple, honest way. Our legal system would appear, mostly, to tend towards encouraging “group-happy” mentality, but I think that’s probably a bad thing. This distinction of primary aims is a different kettle of fish from morality: and pushing naturally “self-happy” people into a “group-happy” box is just going to cause trouble. On the other hand, having a double-standard legal system that treats the two types of person differently, would be rather silly as well. I don’t know what the resolution to this problem is!

One think I love about where I live is the proximity to a big supermarket with a decent-sized discount refrigerator section! Off I nipped, and just my luck – there was a perfect piece of monkfish, just right for one, going for about £2. (Monkfish is never a cheap fish – this was reduced from about £5 – but you definitely get what you pay for.)

I got the basic idea from here, but used what I had anyway. This meant lime instead of lemon, and sweet pointed red peppers, raw, instead of roasted bell peppers – these worked really, really well and I’d recommend that variation. I didn’t have any thyme, but there was some fresh basil (one of my fave herbs) from the discount shelves as well: I put that between the pepper and the fish, as well as some between the pepper and the pan. It all ended up in the sauce, as I’d had to slice the peppers longways to get the seeds out and fish in. Turns out that monkfish expands and curls up when cooked, so this pushed the peppers open and everything went everywhere. This was not a problem tastewise!

The recipe is essentially steaming the fish in wine, instead of in water vapour – I’d recommend the general approach for monkfish again, as it came out very tender, moist and melty. Boiling would have removed the taste, grilling or baking would have dried it out too much. I’ve only ever had monkfish fried before, but prefer this. I would advise sticking closely to the measure of wine – I just did “a glug” which turned out to be rather more sauce than I needed. The monkfish loses some juices in cooking, so you really only need a small amount of wine for one serving, if you add some double cream to the sauce. Do pick a decent white – it’ll go really well alongside the meal!

For reasons of time and hunger, I just did oven chips and a pre-packaged salad along with the fish and peppers. The sauce went really well on the chips, and – surprisingly – was also really great to moisten the salad leaves. I ended up mopping up sauce with spinach and chard – mmmm.

Lastly, you might need to give the fish longer than 12 minutes – mine was still only lukewarm in the centre after that time. Possibly I ended up overcooking it, but it didn’t feel/taste bad for that, and I wanted to play it safe with a piece that was on its use-by date!

Nokias, that is. I’ve had a 3100 for a little more than seven years, and it’s just kept on going. Sadly, after taking many beatings and the numbers all wearing off the buttons, the power button eventually broke, leaving it dead and lifeless. If I had more spare time, I’d photoshop a picture of it in a little coffin, but this would be stretching the analogy a little too far methinks…

Anyhoo, because I’ve been with Virgin mobile for all that time and more, I got hold of a 2600 from them for all of £7.49. Woo! I don’t rate it’s chance of lasting more than a couple of years, but it is an improvement in some ways. The only thing that really annoys me so far is that the buttons have no tactile feedback – I text a lot more than I talk. Ah well… this is it for now until I think the touchscreen market has stabilised a bit more!

Do tell. If it happens to me a second time I’d like to know how to react…

Basically it parses the HTML structure of the page and turns it into a set of colour-coded nodes in 2D space. Try looking at this site’s graph (should be complete in <1min), or if you’ve got a lot of spare time, the Beeb homepage. Facebook’s AJAXy interface makes its graph surprisingly simple.

I’ve been blogging far less than I’d like in the last few months. Suffice to say that there really isn’t much spare time around my job for such things: (personal) email, feed-reading and facebook have all been relegated to fairly infrequent tasks. But I think I imagine far more mental effort in writing here than is actually required. Now I’m typing again, it all comes so easily. I’ve got a bunch of rough drafts of more interesting posts that I might, if I’m lucky, get around to expanding before I go back to work. Thanks are due to the vulpine scribe that (accidentally) reminded me why I should keep this going.

Merry Christmas to all, and I hope 2009 treats you well. Oh, and looky, new site theme! Additional static content may follow.

Ingredients:
4-6 good-quality sausages (I used Tesco ‘Finest’ Pork and Sweet Chilli bangers, which inspired the sauce)
200g (or a little more, depending on hunger) of tagliatelle.
2 medium onions, chopped in half-rings (ideally 1 red, 1 white)
Some mushrooms, chopped as appropriate (to taste)
Cider
~100ml single cream
1/2 red chilli, finely diced, or equivalent of fresh chilli-from-a-jar. Leave seeds out unless you really like hot food.
(optional) some sweet chilli sauce

Instructions:

1. Heat a shallow frying pan to medium, add oil and slow-cook the sausages, turning as necessary. Slower is always better with sausages!
2. In a deeper frying pan, heat some oil until fairly hot, and bung in the onions and mushrooms. After a minute or two turn the heat down and leave them on a low heat for 5 minutes, or until soft and browned.
3. Stir in the red chilli and/or sweet-chilli sauce.
4. Add a long splash of cider, enough to half-cover the onions and mushrooms. Adjust the heat as necessary and simmer the pan’s contents until the cider has reduced quite a lot. At this point, if you like, you can add another splash of cider and re-reduce.
5. While the cider is reducing, boil water and cook your tagliatelle as per pack instructions. When done, drain and return to saucepan, tossing with a little olive oil.
6. By now, your sausages should be done. Remove them from the pan and cut them up into chunks, roughly.
7. Add the sausages and some single cream to the deep pan and stir to coat everything.
8. Lastly, add the tagliatelle and toss thoroughly until coated with sauce. You got the right amount of cream if the tagliatelle is well coated but there’s no excess sauce in the bottom of the pan. Add a bit more cream and/or cider (to taste) if it’s looking a little dry.
9. Serve on warmed plates, enjoy!

If anyone cooks this and comes up with any modifications, please mention in the comments. I threw this together on the hoof without formulating a plan at any point – as such, although I was very pleased with the results, there are probably things that could be done better!

An easily noticed change is the dramatic reduction in the number of possible contexts for my actions.  As a student, I usefully distinguished in my to-do list between actions “on my PC”, “on the internet anywhere”, “in my room, but not at the PC”, “in college”, “in my department”, “in the town centre”, “at the ADC”, “in Devon”… a rather long list.  This helped me prioritise based on where I was, and make efficient trips away from where I was currently to do a number of things at once, rather than, e.g. having to go to the town centre and back more than once in a day.  It also meant I could avoid leaving my PC on for extended periods – I could go through the list of “at PC” and “at internet” things, switch it off, and then look at things to do at home that didn’t require a PC (like reading for essays…).

Now, although I could potentially still make a lot of these distinctions, I find I don’t need to.  Since I’ve spent the summer being poor, my primary collection bucket is a simple hPDA, with lots of yellow cards for collection of “stuff”, a pink card for listing of non-work projects, and two blue cards: one for all non-work actions, and one for any work-actions that I need to process when I’m next at work.  Stuff comes in to the yellow cards, and then I occasionally sit down, identify the actions, and move them to the relevant blue card or do them right away.  When I’m next at work, the work-actions get copied into Outlook, and crossed off immediately.  The non-work actions are never so numerable that subdividing them is worthwhile – two sides of A6 can easily be scanned for things I can do right now.

The really major difference between student and adult life is that of work/home divide.  As a student, it simply doesn’t exist: my bedroom was my study and primary workplace, and all possible actions (things to be done) could be easily lumped under the single meta-category of “life”, whether they were university, social-life, or something else.  Now, I have a clear distinction: when I’m at work, I want to think only about work-related actions, and when I’m not, I don’t.  This isn’t easy, especially since my job demands long hours of me.  I do unavoidably think of personal things whilst at work, which need to be recorded appropriately so I can deal with them in my free time; I also do think of work-related ideas/projects/actions in my free time, and need to be able to record and postpone these until I go back to work.  The hPDA allows me to do this but because I’m transferring work things to Outlook, I find I don’t really, truly trust my system – a necessity in the GTD paradigm. It means I sometimes re-think up a work action in the middle of the night, that I later discover was already in Outlook – but since I’ve then lost sleep over it, this is a blatent Fail.

Returning to using a digital PDA would solve the problem, as I could easily track work and non-work actions in one place (syncing it to Outlook if I wished) and view only the ones appropriate to where I am.  But I don’t want to do that! I’m currently holding out for the release of the Google Android, so I can compare to the iPhone and buy one or other of those.  Then I’ll probably move to a web-based action-tracking system, which I’ll be able to access from my office PC or from the phone, whichever is more convenient.  This example of GTD gone wrong is a pretty clear proof of why David Allen insists that you need to have one single trusted system for all your actions, and be able to get at it at any time.  

The third real difference between student and adult life is simply one of available time: after day-to-day existence, the time I have left for persuing non-work projects is pretty slim.  As a student I had enough time for non-academic projects that I wasn’t forced to refine my action-picking system too much – a few wasted seconds didn’t matter.  Now, I really try to squeeze things in in the 5-minute gaps in life – so being able to track every last thing and effectively pick the best to do right now is so much more important.  I think changing to a web-based to-do list, with the ability to check it anywhere, will probably make this better, but for now I’m just limping along with the hPDA and a slightly less-than-total coverage of open loops in my personal life.

But I did my last shift at the Doubletree yesterday – home today to pack, and then off on a bit of a holiday to see Georgie’s parents, my parents, celebrate some birthdays, and then a wedding in Germany! When I get back I have a week to kill, then start at the ADC, which should keep me busy for a while

I should probably mention for continuity’s sake that yes, I got my II.1 degree (and even scraped a first in my research project, which matters to me a lot more than the written papers) and had a fantastic May Week et cetera. It just seems so long ago… since my PDA broke I’ve been using this crazy old-fashioned method of calendar management, which I think people used to call a ‘pocket diary’. It only started in July so I really can’t tell you much of what happened before that! I will probably get a decent smartphone (and a new laptop) once I’m settled at the Theatre.