One standard tenet of screening programmers comes from Joel Spolsky:

How do you know whether to hire someone? In principle, it's simple. You’re looking for people who are

1. Smart, and
2. Get things done.

That's it. That's all you’re looking for.

That's definitely a great starting point. But I think the list needs one more item: opinionated.

It's not enough to be smart and to get things done. I've interviewed a number of candidates who had a strong history of both. But as soon as I tried to get an opinion out of them I found myself stuck in a bog of equivocation.

Taste

Sometimes the opinions are matters of taste. I like to ask candidates what websites they like, what tools they use, and what they like about them. The last part's the key. I'm not trying to bond with you when I ask what websites you like; I'm trying to get a sense for your taste, your critical eye, and your ability to intuit what's under the bonnet. I'm not going to rule you out for using NetBeans when I like vim; if you're interviewed by someone who will, you probably don't want to work there anyway. I'm trying to figure out how you approach problems, what crutches you have¹, and how much thought you've given to how you work.

Here's an example: you interview two candidates and ask them for their favourite websites. Both say they like Twitter. "Why?" you ask. Candidate A mumbles something inoffensive about how he likes talking to his friends. Candidate B talks about the problem of distributing messages to millions of people, near-instantaneously, pushing the data to web browsers and mobile devices. Who's the stronger candidate?

But delivery is important, too: what if candidate A had spoken confidently about how Twitter's changed how he interacts with his friends, how the public interacts with celebrities, and completely reinvented breaking news: all of a sudden it's not so clear-cut. One candidate is more focused on technology, the other on sociological impact. The right choice depends on your company & the job role, but now you've got more information to make the decision.

Technology

Sometimes the opinions are about technology. I always try to include an open-ended design question in an interview; lately I've been using "How might you design a system that lets people play Monopoly with each other over the internet?"². The openness is a feature; good candidates will ask a few questions before diving in, and there are lots of dramatically different ways of answering.

One candidate proposed a peer-to-peer solution. That's uncommon, but not insane. You can make that work. But he couldn't explain the strengths or drawbacks. He couldn't explain why he'd chosen that instead of a client-server approach. "There's a number of factors involved" isn't an answer if you can't name some factors. I'm totally fine with a candidate changing their mind! A great answer would be "I started this as a peer-to-peer solution, but now I see problems with synchronisation and preventing cheating. So, in retrospect, I think a client-server model would be better." Unfortunately I couldn't get anything out of this candidate; I encouraged and cajoled, but he stuck with neutral platitudes.

The best people I've worked with all have strong opinions about how software & the Internet should work. We don't always agree, but being unafraid to express an opinion means we can discuss a problem and find a decent solution.

There's one final nuance: the people you want have pragmatic opinions and respect other points of view. I don't want people who insist they're right, don't listen to others, or ignore reality. Sometimes there are valid reasons to cut corners, do a hacky job, or do something that stinks. You need people who will roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. But equally, you should expect to hear about how you screwed up, how the situation should never have reached that point, and how to stop it happening in future.

I'm a developer. What am I supposed to do differently?

• Be fearless in interviews. Your goal is to demonstrate your skills & knowledge, not avoid offence. Let's say you discovered the company's using a PHP-based stack, your CV says you just migrated from PHP to Java because PHP was unscalable, and now the interviewer's asking you what the problem was. Trust me: he's not feeling hurt. He's not saying that PHP's great and Java's crap. He wants to know what the problems were, and how changing language fixed them. Don't apologise, or equivocate, or say things like "That's just my opinion." It's obviously your opinion. Explain why you hold it.
• Look at things with a critical eye. Pick a website or app you use daily. What's good about it? What sucks? If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change? What would you change it to? Why do you think it's not that way already? If that change made things better for you, would it make things worse for others? If so, do you still think it should be changed?
• Ask questions. An opinion isn't a snap judgement, and it's only useful if it's been thought through. Interviews aren't interrogations – you get to ask questions too. Don't immediately jump into an answer if someone asks you to design a system; you don't know enough yet. How many users are we expecting? How technical are the users? Are there budget constraints? Is it web-only, desktop-only, mobile-only, or some combination thereof? Is performance an issue? Is it more important to optimise for server-side performance or client-side performance? Can we presume that all our users speak English? Can we trust our data to be valid? Can we hand-wave past a particular bit for now, or would you like me to outline that first?
• Work on your interpersonal skills. Disagreement is fine. Discussion is great. But you must express that disagreement constructively, otherwise you're just being an asshole. Dale Carnegie wrote the classic book on this; The Usual Error is also worth reading.
• Sometimes you have to watch the world burn. Maybe your interviewer is offended by your dislike of PHP, your belief in semantic HTML, or your system design. Be open to the possibility that you're wrong, and be humble, but remember the interviewer's done you a favour. Do you really want to work with someone who isn't open to other people's ideas and won't listen to explanation? Do you want to work somewhere where disagreements are settled with "I'm right because I've been here longest?"

Not well.

FAWM sets a simple goal: 14 songs, 28 days. People take part for all kinds of reasons and have different criteria for what constitutes a song. It's a challenge, not a competition: you're only accountable to yourself. Personally, I wanted to write chiptunes – 8-bit/retro computer game music. I've admired the genre for a long time, and I messed around with making some a couple of years ago. But I didn't manage more than a couple of 20-30 second snippets back then. It taught me how to use the software/hardware (I'm working on a separate article about that), but this would be the first "proper" music I've written since my GCSEs.

I wasn't expecting electronic music to be so time consuming. At full speed, with no blocks on inspiration, I could make one track a day. But that's an entire day of effort; 8-10 hours doing nothing else. More realistically, I could write 1 song every 2 days. I thought this would be enough, especially if I worked hard on weekends. But by February 10^th I'd only managed 3 tracks and I knew I wasn't going to catch up. Between work, Valentine's day, & a friend's week-long visit from the USA I was never going to hit 14 songs. I intended to make a couple more songs with what was left of the month, but I wasn't enjoying it. So I gave up.

I've got a few half-written tracks left over, including one that's a "proper" chiptune (written with the Gameboy's hardware limitations in mind). One of my worries was that although I was using simple synths and tone generators, I wasn't making "real" chiptunes. The chiptune police would kick down my door, NES zappers drawn, shouting "Imposter!". Thus I tried sticking a bit closer to the original medium. I'd like to finish them off at some point, but I'm waiting for the desire to return.

So here they are: 3 songs that were meant to be chiptunes but probably count more as "chiptune inspired":

• Bassline Bounce
• Carnival Pixels
• 5 Pin Chip

Would I do it again next year? Probably not. The FAWM community itself is amazing and I really appreciated the encouragement I received. But I don't think I can cram 14 chiptunes into one month without putting everything else on hold; even if I could, that doesn't seem like a fun activity. If I did take part again it would probably be something acoustic.

Because this technology is still stuck in the lab, demonstrated under carefully controlled conditions, my instincts are to dismiss it as speculation or decades away. But I've learnt that my instincts are basically slaves to my lack of long-term imagination. When I was 14 I read about e-ink and flexible displays. They seemed far-fetched then, but Kindles have been around for years and flexible displays seem just around the corner. Self-driving cars are probably closer than I think.

So how would that affect the tech world? Why would Google bother? Google say it's to advance society, which is probably partially true. But to me, the interesting part is the data. A self-driving car necessarily involves a whole bunch of sensors and cameras. A GPS and internet link are practically a given. So when this technology makes it into commercial vehicles Google's going to have a huge competitive advantage when it comes to maps and local data.

You won't need a dedicated street view team because you can use the imagery from people's cars. 3D maps like Apple's come from laser rangefinders and cameras, both of which will be built in to people's cars. Traffic flow data already comes from people's phones; it's a tiny step to pull it from the car directly. Updating maps with new/missing/altered roads is a similarly small step. As mobile bandwidth increases, the idea of a live streetview might actually be feasible. Scary as hell, but feasible.

This is all obviously good news for Google and good news for Google's users, but mapping competitors should worry. It's not about taking the human out of the process; it's taking the employee out of it. Other companies would have to pay people to gather data that Google's harvesting ambiently.

And now something completely unrelated

For a while I've been trying to figure out how to fit this thought into 140 characters, and failed:

You may think that with iPads and private space travel and drone strikes that we're living in the future. But your washing machine's UI begs to differ.

But trying to get a thought into a tweet can leave it open to misinterpretation. Is it a less-pithy version of "The future's already here, it's just not very evenly distributed"? Did Warren Ellis pre-emptively skewer it? The answer to both questions is "Yes and no."

My intention wasn't to normalise the age we're living in. I was trying to express the concept that some things are mind-blowingly amazing, whereas others remain mundane and niggling. I thought the great promise of the future isn't a few giant things, but a thousand tiny ones. Maybe we're condemned to overlook them; progress itself is a thousand tiny steps rather than one giant leap.

The shape of my life now is radically different compared to my life in 2003. And yet I still have to do my best Egyptologist impression when doing the laundry. A courier can't be more specific about a delivery time than a 12 hour window. I still buy pasta from the supermarket and find 3 unopened packs when I get home.

All I'm saying is there's still some room for improvement.

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Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</ifModule>

You load your website and watch the network inspector in Chrome. You hit refresh, but you still see loads of requests for your static files. You hit refresh again. Maybe it cached this time, or maybe not. But refresh again, and everything gets retransferred! You start looking at individual requests. The headers are being set properly. You read the spec, and everything looks fine. Other browsers are respecting the headers and doing the right thing. What the hell's going on?

You're not going mad, and you probably haven't messed up. Chrome's trying to be helpful: it can't tell you're a web developer, and it doesn't know you're tapping that refresh button to test the server. Chrome's detecting the multiple refreshes, presuming you're doing it because the page is broken, and reloading everything from the server. I haven't figured out the exact behaviour it uses to do this, but it seems it involves whether you click through to other pages or not. As a result, you'll get more reliable testing if you navigate around your app a bit rather than clicking refresh.

But tonight was different. I arrived home late, and had just collapsed on the sofa when there was a sudden knock on the door. Standing up, I gazed down the half-lit hallway to see the silhouette of a teenager in a bad costume. "I'll pretend I'm not in," I thought. Then a couple of braincells kicked in and I realised the lights were on. I had to answer it.

I rushed to the kitchen and looked in the cupboard. Nothing. No sweets, no pastries, no chocolate. But there was one thing. One vague possibility. I grabbed it and headed to the door.

When I opened it the two teens had cut their losses and were halfway across the road, but they turned around when they heard the door open. "Err, trick or treat?" one asked, hopefully, not moving closer. And that's when I found myself possessed by a spirit infinitely older than my own, speaking words I'd promised myself I would never utter.

"I'm really sorry, I've just got home from a long day at work and I haven't got any sweets in the house," I said. "But I can give you this pomegranate if you wanted."

At some point – some point in the past year – I have changed from the person who buys sweets for Halloween to the person who offers trick-or-treaters fruit. Children tell playground horror stories about people like me. I can make excuses and plead special circumstances, but let's face facts: they asked for sweets. They got fruit.

The ghouls shrugged non-committally and walked off, and I thank them for that. No egging of the house, no shouted abuse. Perhaps they understood that the crashing realisation of what I have become is the greatest trick of all. But they probably just thought they'd try next door.

I got talking to one of the English women in our group. We soon discovered we'd gone to the same university. But not only that: at the same time. But not only that: we had some friends in common. But not only that: I had been to her house. One of our friends in common was her old housemate, and we'd met there for pre-club drinks. And here we were, in the middle of nowhere, on the opposite side of the planet.

I started with a design on Thingiverse and made some minor changes: I altered the slot size to work with 5mm Perspex and extended the rear feet because I was worried about the stand's stability. After a few rounds of trial and error on the laser cutter, I got a snug fit and a working stand. I used some scrap Perspex for mine, so there are some small cut-outs on the bottom edge.

If I were doing this again I'd either make the rear leg rounded so the notch wasn't supported with such a thin bit of Perspex (Perspex shatters easily) or make this out of something like MDF or ABS. I've used this stand for over a year on a daily basis and it's not failed in use, but I did drop one and the foot broke at the narrowest part. I'd also consider raising the iPad a little further off the desk, so you could charge it in a portrait orientation.

My main use case for this these days is to display Concentrate! while working, though I've also used it to keep an eye on the news at times of civil unrest and media inquisitions.

Download the DXF file to make your own, or check it out on Thingiverse.

The symptom

the Ubuntu 12.04 alternate installer fails when installing the base system, telling you that the disk is corrupt. You'll get an error message along the lines of "problem reading data from the CDROM".

The problem

Unetbootin/7zip have known bugs with long file names/file paths. These have been open for a couple of years, so don't expect them to be fixed soon.

The solution

Use Ubuntu's startup disk creator instead. You can either run it from the launcher or as usb-creator-gtk from a console.

Bug number two: your DBAN USB key won't boot.

The symptom

When you try to boot from your DBAN USB key you get the boot menu, but attempting to boot any of the entries fails with the message "Could not find ramdisk image:/ubninit".

The problem

Unetbootin doesn't configure syslinux.cfg properly.

The solution

Edit syslinux.cfg, replacing all occurrences of "ubninit" with "ISOLINUX.BIN" and the one occurrence of "ubnkern" with "DBAN.BZI". It's case sensitive, so make sure it's all uppercase.

Bonus DBAN/Unetbootin tip

Unetbootin creates a default boot option for DBAN that includes the --autonuke flag. This means your DBAN key is especially dangerous – if you boot off the key, either by accident or design, it'll wipe all disks without any human intervention. Avoid this by removing the --autonuke option from the section marked label unetbootindefault while you've got syslinux.cfg open.

Make sure it's worth it.

By the time you've photographed, uploaded, form-filled, written about your item, packed it, addressed it, and taken it to the post office you will have spent at least an hour per item. This isn't a good use of your time if it sells for 99p. (I sometimes list stuff that I know isn't going to perform well if it's not suitable for charity shops and/or I'll feel guilty about throwing it away.)

What does and doesn't sell?

Things that sell well:

• Photographic equipment
• Computer equipment
• Anything that would make you go "Oooooh" at a jumble sale.

Things that sell OK:

• CDs
• DVD boxed sets
• Actually collectible collectibles
• obsolete computer hardware
• small organisational things (wallets, purses, folders, cases). I don't understand why, but they seem to.

Things that don't sell:

• Books
• DVDs
• Chargers and cables
• Small furniture.

Don't get your hopes up.

Searching eBay for completed listings similar to your item will give you an idea about what it's really worth. You may think it's worth £100 but if everyone else's sold for £40, yours will sell for £40. A good listing and a bit of luck might help you do a bit better, but it might also do a bit worse.

Buy a scale, and use eBay's postage calculator.

I bought a small hanging scale for £5 and weigh everything I'm selling. If you weigh the item with a jiffy bag you'll get an exact cost for postage. I recycle envelopes and boxes from other purchases, but you can also buy packaging from pound shops and on eBay itself. Don't buy from the post office – it's really expensive.

List items for free.

If you your listing starts at 99p and only has one photo then you don't pay anything. You can use custom HTML in the description and include extra photos that way, presuming you have somewhere to host them. Beware! Flickr explicitly blocks image links from eBay referers.

Place 10 day listings and start them on Thursday evening.

It's worth spending 6p per item to schedule all your listings to start on Thursday evening. They'll finish on Sunday evening – a time when people are at home and likely to be looking at the computer. It also gets two weekends to attract bidders and watchers. Theoretically you only have to go to the post office once, on Monday, but there's always one arsehole who won't pay you until Tuesday evening.

Buy it Now probably isn't worth it.

The Buy it Now option disappears as soon as you get your first bidder. People will make a 99p bid in to stop other people buying it outright.

Good pictures help, lots of pictures help.

If it's just a book or a DVD this isn't important, but if you want to sell something that's worth more than £50 then photograph it from every angle and write a lot about it. You'll get more watchers and bidders that way. If you can include photos of your item working, then do so.

Cross-link if you like, but it doesn't work.

If I'm selling a bunch of similar items then I add links to the others in each listing. Other books by the same author, a laptop case for a laptop, or a keyboard that matches a mouse; that kind of thing. I've also got a standard boilerplate that links through to my other items for sale. Despite this, it's very rare to sell more than one thing to anyone. It's probably not worth the hassle.

Most bids happen in the last few minutes.

It's not unusual for bids to trickle in for the first 9 days and only pick up in the last few minutes/seconds. If you've got a lot of watchers – say, more than 15 – then this becomes more likely. Don't panic if you've not hit your expected price before the last day.

Fill out the proof of postage certificate at home.

You can save yourself some time at the Post Office by filling out the certificate at home. Sometimes the counter staff will give you a pad for free, but you can also order over the phone or online. I've also managed to order via email but I've seen suggestions that this only works for business addresses. So far I've never had to use the proof of postage, but it's reassuring and definitely worth doing for larger trades. PayPal and eBay are biased towards the buyer, so if there is a dispute all documentation helps you.

Take a book to the post office.

There will be queues. You will be bored. Take a book.

When my server starts, /home isn't mounted automatically. /home's on an encrypted filesystem, and the system runs without a keyboard and monitor, so I want it to boot up normally without /home and I'll mount it the next time I login. When /home becomes available, it should start a media server and NFS sharing.

It's not well documented, but it's easy under Ubuntu. You need to use upstart and create an init script. These live in /etc/init/ and can have any name ending in .conf. You can either write your script directly in the init script, or call another script elsewhere. As I only had a couple of tasks to perform the behaviour's more obvious if it's in the init script. Here's what mine looks like:

# mounted-home - Trigger actions when home becomes available. 

description "Trigger actions when /home becomes available." 

start on mounted MOUNTPOINT=/home 

task 

script
    /etc/init.d/forked-daapd restart
    service nfs-kernel-server restart   
end script

You could also write a complementary script that stops these things when the home directory is unmounted, but I don't normally unmount my home dir and there's no harm in running this script repeatedly – the restart command will start it if it's stopped, or bounce it if it's already running.

Catball Eats It All is a pinball-platformer game for iOS. You are the Catball, and must roll & float through the level eating all the little bits of food before the timer runs out. Once you've got all the food, you eat the level itself. It's a simple concept, and the delight is in the execution: great artwork (from Nosego), great music (from Ben Thornewill/Jukebox the Ghost), and great sound effects. There's also a refreshing absence of freemium piffle. Overall, it's a charmer.

There are some flaws, however: the controls can be irritating and hard to master. In many ways, the controls are the game. It's sometimes fairly hard but that tends to flow from the controls rather than the game itself. It also made a poor first impression, downloading its level data when you run it for the first time (instead of when you install it), so you're out of luck if you try it out somewhere without internet. Fortunately, this was fixed in a recent update.

It's a bit of a slow burner, and I found myself playing it more for the music than the gameplay. But it's a lovely little game for 69p, and definitely worth your time - especially if you like Kometun, pinball, or cats.

Overall: 7/10. Recommended; Available from the iTunes store.

Don't forget your iTunes backup password. There's no going back if you tick the "encrypt my backups" option. You can't trash the old backups and make a new one with a known password. You can't recover the old password (unless it's really weak and you'll pay £80). Your iPad will still back up – but you can't restore without the password. If you forget your password and want a usable backup, you must blank your iPad and start from scratch.

iPad encryption is strong. Really strong. I think of the iPad as a consumer device and expected security to match – allowing new backups, and/or weak encryption. Nope: it uses AES256 for encryption, SHA-1 hashes for filenames¹, and random keys as part of each backup². All the encryption's handled on the iPad and no data leaves the iPad unencrypted³. Each file in the backup gets a different encryption key¹. You need the passcode to unlock the device, and checking this is done on the iPad itself.

Ubiquitous capture for passwords is vital. Use a password safe – a program that stores your passwords, so you can memorise 1 really strong password & use randomised passwords for everything – and make sure everything goes in there. No paper scraps. No "Oh, I'll remember this one." EVERYTHING. If you find a password you've written down, put it in the password safe as "unknown" before destroying it.

Password reuse can be a good thing. Why the fuck didn't I use my Apple ID password? Or the unlock code for the iPad? Or my encrypted HD password? Or my encrypted PC backup password? Because I'm a fucking idiot, that's why.

If you don't have more than one copy of your data, you don't have it. My password safe was on my iPad. I would have been stuck even if I'd stored it in there. You need multiple copies of your data, in multiple locations, and not tied to any one device.

¹ iPhone Data Protection in-depth, slide 48.
² iPhone Data Protection in-depth, slide 52.
³ Data Decryption & Password Recovery, slide 25.
Evolution of iOS Protection and iPhone Forensics: from iPhone OS to iOS 5, slides 29-30.

This evening I was going through some old boxes and I found this teddybear. He has a NatWest ribbon on – he's clearly a promotional item, and not a much-loved childhood friend. Somehow he’d been decapitated while in storage. What am I supposed to do with a headless teddy?

I’m supposed to throw him away, of course. But I don’t think I can. His big black eyes are pleading with me to love him.

I think I have issues with anthropomorphism.

1. The Setting
2. The Model
3. The Point
4. The Shoot
5. The Post-processing
6. The Lessons
7. The Results

The Setting

Abandoned buildings are fun and scary. I spotted one with easy access from a bus ride, and thought it could make a good setting. A friend suggested that as sets go they've been done to death. I suppose they have - even I've used one before - but I wasn't looking to create something groundbreaking, just something interesting to me. "This is my photograph. There are many others like it but this one is mine," and all that.

There are some risks with abandoned buildings. They are dirty and possibly structurally unsound so you need to keep your wits about you. You never know if you're going to find squatters or other people in there. You're trespassing, which in the UK is a civil offence (ie. you're risking court, not an arrest). I am not a lawyer, or even an experienced trespasser, but I expect that if you're not causing any damage then if you do meet a security guard they'll ask you to leave, nothing more. I am paranoid so I left anything identifying in my wallet at home anyway.

When in the building itself, keep an eye out for broken glass, used needles, excrement, etc. Bring a torch even if it's a sunny day outside. Look for signs of human habitation - bedding, fresh rubbish, etc. If you do meet someone chances are they'll be friendly (or at least leave you alone), certainly if you explain that you're just looking around - but on the other hand you've probably got some expensive equipment with you. If you're going with someone else (which is a damn good idea) then take care of them too, especially if they're a model - tell them in advance so they can bring some rugged footwear and clothes. You may be fine in jeans and boots but if they're in ballet pumps and a floaty dress they might not be so lucky. Don't take unnecessary risks, and try to think before you move (especially if you're on an upper floor or looking at stairs). With wooden floors be aware of damp and flexing surfaces; with metal be aware of rust; with concrete be aware of cracked or broken surfaces. If you're going up stairs try to stay as close to the point of support as you can (generally close to the wall).

The Model

I don't have any go-to models in London at the moment so I asked a friend of mine, Lara, who seemed like she'd have the temperament for prancing around in front of a camera. I met Lara at jitsu lessons, and I figured that if we both knew some jitsu we stood a fighting chance against zombies, vampires, and anyone else unsavoury we encountered inside the building. (Lara's better than I am.) As usual I got her to sign a standard model release, and told her about the setting and the point of the shoot.

The Point

I wanted to try out some of the small-strobe lighting techniques recommended by Strobist. I was also interested to see how my cheap eBay flash held up. I was planning to borrow another, more powerful speedlite from a friend, but alas that didn't work out. I carried everything by bike - camera, tripod, light stand, umbrella. The umbrella got ball-bungeed to the stand, and the stand got ball-bungeed to the bike. It made riding ungainly, but not unbearably so. That said, I'd have been out of luck if I wanted two stands and I wouldn't make a habit of going by bike. I've decided the best accessory a photographer can have is an assistant. An assistant with a car.

We only had an evening after work to do it; I wanted to get in quickly before the hole was boarded up, so didn't want to wait until the weekend. We'd also be fighting fading ambient light in what was likely to be a fairly dingy setting anyway. With two lights this wouldn't be a problem as you can light both the subject and the background, but with just one low-powered strobe it was likely to be limiting. I brought a tripod along so I could use long exposures and a couple of lenses that open up to f/2 and f/1.8. The only mental image I had in my mind going in was of a pristine secretary in the ruined building, so I asked Lara to bring some office clothes with her.

On the whole, this was very much a "Wander around an abandoned building while taking some photos" rather than "A photoshoot that happens to be in an abandoned building."

The Shoot

We met a little later than planned, around 19:40. We walked to the building and went inside. It was a bit of a wreck. We looked on the first floor and found used needles, razor blades, and a condom wrapper. We tried the next floor up, which had less drug paraphernalia but more turds and rubbish. There was detritus everywhere. We decided to go down to the first floor instead of scouting further as the light was fading. I got Lara to change into her secretarial garb and grabbed some available light portraits. Even at this late stage I had to shoot at a high ISO rating, and pushed my luck too much with slow shutter speeds. I tried grabbing some wide-angle shots to try and get a broad view of the broken office with Lara in the centre, but these were prosaic due to boring lighting. Slightly better were the attempts to use a broken window as a framing device. I stuck a diffuser on the flash and placed it to camera left, bouncing it off the ceiling.

After that there was a quick outfit change to the green silk top, and a lighting change too. The light was coming from one silvered umbrella, wherein I valiantly attempted to avoid reflections in the windows behind Lara. I tried to get a nice exposure of the world outside to provide a little interest in the background. We did some against the pillar , and some standing in the open without the shirt, but again they turned out flat and lifeless. I could have made this better by asking Lara to do something more interesting than stand there.

We were rapidly losing the light and starting to freak out about when the occupants would return, so we packed up and left for the outside world. We did some more pictures outside which were my favourite images of the shoot. I slapped a couple of CTO gels onto the flash to bring the flash closer to the sodium streetlights, stuck a cereal-box snoot on it, and stuck it high up to camera left. I tried using a longer shutter speed than normal to get a blurry background and a little light trail while using the flash to freeze Lara. I used a similar setup for the doorway pictures, but the snooted light was closer this time and the ratio between the flash and ambient was lower.

It was starting to get late so we retired to a nearby coffee shop and had a couple of warm drinks (camomile tea for me, hot chocolate with marshmallows for her) and had a look at the pictures. Then we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

The Post-processing

Lara is basically stunning, so I didn't have to do anything cosmetic. Everything was compensating for my own mistakes; I cropped down a bit more and tightened up the composition, cloned out some distracting spots and reflections from my light, and tweaked the colour balance to make the lighting a little less orange. I converted a couple of images to black and white, because the colour wasn't adding anything to the image and (in one case) because heavily-grainy images work better in black and white than in colour. I'm still not entirely happy with that one. I also lightened a shadow on Lara's face in one shot to stop it from being too distracting.

I ended up doing more processing than I like on these. Generally I'm a fan of Ansel Adams' idea of previsualising and getting things right in-camera, but I'm not going to beat myself up too heavily over these as it was dark and hard to see what's in the viewfinder (as well as the first shoot I've done for a long time).

The Lessons

1. I don't care how dark it is, ISO 1600 is only for once-in-a-lifetime things like sporting events and assassinations. Break out the tripod instead or open up as wide as you can go and live with no depth-of-field. If you're shooting wide-angle it's not going to be too bad anyway.
2. Some abandoned buildings are horrific. Pick ones far away from cities and transport hubs, they're less likely to be drug dens and flop houses.
3. If you're having trouble with composing in the viewfinder, be sure to pay attention to it on the LCD. Don't just concentrate on the exposure.
4. The best accessory a photographer can have is an assistant. An assistant with a car.
5. The second-best accessory is a reflector. (This would have made my one-light setup more flexible and allowed me to provide some fill light).
6. Asking the model to do something silly often results in a more interesting image.

The Results

These are in a gallery on Ethicsgirls.

What I want

Some things are absolutely non-negotiable features:

• Must be able to scrobble (ie. submit music to Last.fm).
• Must be able to deal with large collections of music (18,000 tracks or thereabouts).
• Must support UTF-8, for artists with non-ASCII names.

Some things are mere nice-to-haves, varying from "This is standard stuff and I'll be rather annoyed if you don't have it" to "Mere frivolity":

• Support for embedded artwork. Lots of players are quite keen to fetch artwork from Amazon; I don't necessarily want artwork in my music player, but if you're going to display it at least use the details in the files.
• Support for watching directories for new files - a kind of auto-playlist-management thing. This ties in with the above requirement of 'not melting when dealing with large collections' - it's no good watching my nominated directories if you're going to rape my CPU every 5 minutes to check for new files.
• Persistent queues. I generally listen to my entire collection on shuffle, and just queue up albums and tracks I particularly want to hear as and when. Sometimes the queue gets quite long; it should be saved and restored if the music player is quit and re-run.
• A Winamp 2-style interface. I've never been seduced by the "your media player should look sexy" arguments, but I like the winamp interface because it lets me have the player always on my screen without taking up lots of space (see the top of this screenshot).

What I currently use: XMMS 1

I have been using XMMS for many years now. It has some niggles in it, but mostly it's OK. But, like everything else here, it sucks:

• Not-quite-there support for UTF-8: some names show OK, others don't. Fortunately it still scrobbles these tracks OK, so I can live with it displaying weirdly in the playlist.
• No concept of a library, so whenever I buy another CD or download a new track I have to add it to the playlist by hand, or put up with duplicates. Generally I never bother - instead, I periodically clear the entire playlist and re-add the directories where I keep my music.
• No persistent playqueue. This was the one that made me start to look for a replacement.
• Not currently maintained. Which is fine, really, as it works fine and doesn't crash. But none of these niggles are ever going to be fixed.

Despite these I've stuck with it at home; it's the only player I've found that takes the 18,000 tracks in my collection in its stride. Changing between tracks is quick, searching and scrolling the list is fast. I can go without the tree-view browsers in other players if they're going to be dog-slow to use.

First attempt at something else: Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is surprisingly good. But, despite this, it sucks:

• It does support a library management system, but I can only tell it to watch a single folder! I don't have all my music below a single directory.
• The library-watcher goes absolutely nuts whenever I add new music to the collection, taking many minutes at 100% CPU to find the 10 new files I've added. It periodically does a similar thing just to find out if I have added something or not.
• No embedded artwork support.
• No persistent queues.
• A disturbing habit of crashing X when I quit it on my work computer. It doesn't do this at home, but I still do not approve. Having everything I'm currently working on disappear is not pleasant.

It gets an honourable mention for working out of the box and having a mostly non-broken artist/album/track browser.

Amarok

Turns out I work with someone who used to be a core developer on Amarok, and I read on his blog how unremittingly awesome it was. I trusted him, and I believed the hype. So I installed it and gave it a spin. Unfortunately it made me viscerally angry on my first attempt at using it. It has a startup wizard that wanted me to set it up a database before I could use it. Once I'd got over the shock of a music player insisting on an SQL backend I told it where my music could be found. It then spent 20 minutes indexing my music, in silence, as it told me to 'please wait'. I've since been told that I could have played stuff direct from the filesystem in that time, but there was nothing on the screen to indicate this. Then when it had finally done this I tried to play some music. It played me the introduction clip from the developers, then gave me an error message telling me it couldn't actually play MP3s after all. This was the final straw; having waited patiently for it to do its thing only to be told that the music player couldn't actually play any music drove me over the edge and I quit in disgust.

But I am a sucker. People kept telling me that I was just unlucky and it was actually very good. So I gave it another spin. Here's why it sucks:

• It doesn't use quite as much of the CPU when scanning for new files in the library, but it's still noticeable when it does it, and it's not exactly nimble.
• Laggy when changing tracks and displaying information about what's currently playing.
• I don't think its queue persists, but I'm not sure.
• The user interface feels 'big'. It uses a lot of space to display little information. It's also somewhat 'modal' - there's information displayed when the player is stopped that isn't there when it's playing. For instance, it's actually got quite a neat little "recently added" display that shows you stuff new to your library - but you can't get at this when the player's playing. You must stop it first if you want to listen to something new (or find it manually).
• Library browsing is slow, even though it's got a Postgres database as its backend.
• Prediction/exploration functions are probably only any good when you've listened to several thousand tracks (I think it's trying to recommend tracks I listen to for playing next); as it is, it just feels cluttered and useless.
• I think it considers a track played as soon as any of it has been played; skipping it doesn't count as a non-play. If this isn't a case then the user interface needs to be brushed up.

If you're looking for something that's going to insist you explore your music and have the time to devote to letting it build up a decent body of stats to use, Amarok may be worth a look. Personally, I'd give it a miss. Sorry Max.

Audacious

Audacious is either the first or second rewrite of the original XMMS codebase; it's one of those projects that's been forked and forked again. It is, on face value, a maintained version of XMMS. It's got scrobbling support, the Winamp interface I like, and also supports UTF-8. In fact, it's almost good enough to replace XMMS. But, like the others mentioned here, it sucks:

• No persistent playqueue.
• No automatic library management.
• Really slow when dealing with big playlists; scrolling through the list is not possible due to the lag. Displaying the next page takes around 10 seconds on a playlist of 18,000 tracks. It might be quicker when all the metadata has been loaded in already, but it'd have to re-do it whenever I re-loaded the playlist. XMMS displays the filenames of files and redraws them once it's loaded the metadata; it seems Audacious waits to load the data for all the files and then redraws the screen.
• At least one of the main developers is a jerk. This isn't a big thing for most people, but I was willing to fix the first item, and could probably have a stab at the second two. But having chatted on the IRC channel for a bit I can't face it. The devs apparently want to take Audacious in a different direction, and dealing with such a... forceful personality would not be fun. My motivation to contribute has gone.

As it happens I have switched to Audacious at work - I have a small enough MP3 collection at work that any lag is not enough to annoy me, and the improved UTF-8 support is worth any slowdown.

XMMS2

I haven't actually tried this, but this is why I think it sucks anyway:

• A client-server model for a music player? You've got to be kidding me. I can see why it would be useful in some cases, but I'm not building a jukebox or placing client units throughout my flat. I just want to listen to music on my computer. Client-server is overkill. I could forgive this, but...
• All the clients look like 'my first GUI app'. They are pretty much all huge and/or horrible. The few clients that I looked at and thought "I could use this every single day" are either abandoned or missing key functionality. When they say it's not ready for public usage yet, they're not kidding.

Exaile

Apparently some people look at software projects like Amarok and think "Hey, that's neat. Let's rewrite it in Python.". Rhythmbox decided they wanted Amarok in GTK rather than QT, and it's ended up a little different, so maybe the same thing will happen with Exaile. It's a bit more minimal (which is a good thing), but it still sucks:

• No embedded artwork support.
• Smart playlists aren't automatically updated - if you have a playlist open on a tab and that playlist gets new tracks added to it, the open tab does not gain them. You must close it and re-open.
• There's a lag on changing tracks. There's a lag whenever you try and do just about anything, in fact - 3-5 seconds after adding something to your playlist and around 10 seconds when you change the tree browser from 'artist' to 'album' or similar. Naturally there's a lag and a whole load of CPU usage when the library updates itself.
• I don't think I can close the main window and have it run just in the tray.

It does, however, have persistent playqueues. It would be better if it had more info to begin with (see below).

General Reflections

It would be really useful if there was some source that could give a music player details about everything you've ever listened to; Last.fm would be the obvious source but there's (currently) no feed for your own scrobbles, and you can't get your entire scrobbling history from Last.fm. This is a shame; I have a hunch that Amarok's features would be much better if you could 'prime the pump' with this data; likewise for Exaile's smart playlists.

Before emailing me madly to tell me how wrong I am, please understand I'm not impugning you personally for your choices; if these players work for you, great. Unfortunately, they don't entirely work for me.

Anyway, I decided that I was going to stop living on the edge and get an automatic nightly backup. My previous backup strategy was "Burn stuff to DVD when I remember". I could just about fit all my documents, mail, source code, and other stuff onto one DVD. But my music wasn't backed up (though not such a big deal, as it was on my iPod and I've got the original CDs) and my photos were not fantastically well backed up. This was the clincher: I'd recently bought two 4 gigabyte CompactFlash cards for use with my camera. The upshot of this was that I often had shoots that were > 4Gb - often as much as 8Gb. That won't all fit on one DVD so backing them up was a pain. Finally, backing up to DVD was something I only did once every month or so and DVDs aren't all that permanent anyway. It would be just my luck to suffer a hard disk crash and then find all my backups are unreadable.

Here's what I needed from the new system:

• Automatic - I shouldn't have to do anything. If it relies on my involvement it will never get done.
• Secure - Not a massive concern in the real world, but it adds to the psychological feeling of security. I want to know that if someone nicks my backup it's useless to them - they don't get all my cached passwords, financial records, and naked pictures of my girlfriend.
• Incremental - More of a nice-to-have than a requirement, an incremental backup lets you go back to earlier snapshots if you want to. Rather than taking full backups every day (which would require huge amounts of space) you just store the bits that have changed, although it looks to the system like each one is a full backup.

Step 1: Assumptions and Requirements

I run Debian Linux on my PC so this is written from that perspective, but this should work fine on just about any Linux machine.

In hardware terms you just need a spare hard disk. I got a 500GB External HD which I'm using via USB. The drive needs to be slightly bigger than the data you're backing up. I have 400Gb of data drives in my machine, so 500Gb is ample. Personally I chose to back up the entire system, though some people consider that overkill and just back up /home (where all your documents and personal settings are stored). I also like to have a backup of /etc for my system settings, /root for root's home directory (I have a couple of sysadminny scripts in there, some environment settings, etc), and I've also got a /data partition which is where all my photos end up. So backing up just /home wasn't for me. Rather than figure out what bits I wanted to back up and which bits I could ignore, I just backed everything up.

In software terms you need rsync and LUKS:

Step 2: Encrypt and mount the disk

I found this article useful when trying to figure this out the first time around.

1. Your first step is to figure out where your disk is. If it's an IDE drive you'll find the device on /dev/hdb or similar, and the partition on /dev/hdb1. If you need to partition the drive then try using cfdisk (my favourite, although not always available) or fdisk.

   My drive's USB, which means it lives on /dev/sda1, but it's better to use one of the links in /dev/disk/. These are automatically created symlinks to devices so you don't have to worry about what order you plug stuff in. This doesn't really matter - we're only going to be referring to the device once - but it's good to know.

   Be very careful when choosing your device, as we're about to torch all the information on it. Set it up as an encrypted LUKS container like this:

   cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/disk/by-label/My_Book

   It'll ask you if you're sure you want to destroy the data on this drive, then prompt you for a passphrase. Try and pick a good one.

2. Now we open our newly encrypted device and make a filesystem on it. The first command creates a mapped device on /dev/mapper/ and the second sets up a filesystem - I've gone with Ext3, but you can pick your favourite.

   cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/disk/by-label/My_Book crypto_backup
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypto_backup

3. That's it - you've now got an encrypted drive ready to roll.

   mkdir /mnt/backup
mount /dev/mapper/crypto_backup /mnt/backup

NB. If you have one of these Western Digital drives, you may find that they don't let you mount them by label after you've encrypted them. Use /dev/disk/by-id instead if this is an issue for you.

Step 3: Set up the backup

I found this article to be a very thorough explanation of backing stuff up using rsync. It may be useful if you want the mucky details.

1. Perform the initial backup (this is all on one line):

   rsync -av --exclude=/media --exclude=/media --exclude=/mnt / /mnt/backup/backup.0

   The -av puts rsync into archive mode (which makes it mirror things like file permissions, copying symlinks as symlinks, etc), and makes it verbose so it tells you what's going on. The excludes keep it from trying to back up itself, my Ipod if I leave it plugged in overnight, or any CDs I have in the drive. The final two arguments are the source and destination - in this case the filesystem root / and the backup.0 folder in /mnt/backup. That's it - you're all backed up.

2. Let's create the backup script that performs the incremental backups. Create this, change the BACKUP_ROOT and BACKUP_SOURCE lines to suit and stick it somewhere safe - /root/bin/backupscript for instance:

   #!/bin/bash
BACKUP_ROOT=/mnt/backup
BACKUP_SOURCE=/

rm -rf $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.3
mv $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.2 $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.3
mv $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.1 $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.2
mv $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.0 $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.1
# This next bit should all be on one line!
rsync -ua --delete --exclude=/media --exclude=/mnt --link-dest=$BACKUP_ROOT/backup.1 $BACKUP_SOURCE $BACKUP_ROOT/backup.0

   First of all this removes the oldest backup (4 days ago). Then it ages all the backups by one, before backing up the system. After it's run you'll find you've got 4 days worth of backups, but it only takes up a bit more space than one backup. How does that work?

   The magic is in the --link-dest parameter. To explain this I'll have to get a bit abstract, so bear with me. When you see a list of files in a directory, you're not actually seeing the files - you're seeing a bunch of links to certain areas of a disk. You can have more than one link to the same area of disk, and it'll look to your computer like you've got the same file in several places - but really the file's only stored once on the disk itself. When you remove the file you're actually removing a link, and it's only when there's no links left that the computer will use the space for something else.

   By way of analogy consider addresses for houses. You could post stuff to "42 Prudence Avenue, The Village" and it'll arrive at your house - but you could also post stuff to "The Old Windmill, The Village" or "White Cottage, Prudence Avenue, The Village" and it will all arrive. This doesn't mean you've got three houses, it's just three different ways of pointing to them. And it's only when all of them are removed from the council's list of ratepayers that they come and repossess your house.

   Returning to the topic at hand: the --link-dest argument performs a little magic and makes links to files in the given directory if the file hasn't changed. So it looks like you've got 4 copies of a file - one in each day's backup - but really it's only stored once.

Step 4: Automate it

1. First up you need to edit root's crontab so that the backup runs nightly. su to root then run crontab -e and add the following line:

   # m h dom mon dow command
0 3 * * * /root/bin/backupscript

   This tells cron to run your backupscript every day at 3AM. Make sure your backup script is executable! chmod +x /root/bin/backupscript

2. Now we need to make sure that the encrypted container is mapped at boot, and mounted automatically for us. Add a line to /etc/crypttab so it looks something like this:

   # <target name> <source device> <key file> <options>
crypto_backup /dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_5000AAJS_Externa_123-part1 none luks

   This tells the system that the /dev/disk/by-id/usb-WDetc device should be mapped to /dev/mapper/crypto_backup on startup as a LUKS container. As no key file is specified it will prompt for a password on bootup.

3. Now we've told the system how to map the device we can just add it to /etc/fstab like anything else:

   # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
/dev/mapper/crypto_backup /mnt/backup ext3 defaults 0 2

Limitations

• If you're using this to backup a database (eg. MySQL) you are entering a world of pain. MySQL generally stores its databases in a whole bunch of files. To take a snapshot of a database from the filesystem you'd have to stop the database entirely, copy all the files, then start it again - and that's not a supported way of doing things. Otherwise you're just crossing your fingers that nothing changes the database while you're trying to back it up (either a user of the database like a website or a program, or MySQL itself deciding now's a good time to reindex or whatever). Rsync will make sure that your files are not changed during the backup, but it doesn't do it for an entire directory. You're better scheduling a regular backup using mysql_dump or similar to somewhere on your hard disk, and letting those backups get copied by rsync instead.
• You are not totally safe. If this is your home computer this is a backup regime that you are justified in feeling smug about. If you're an investment bank or a medical facility you should be panicking. What if there's a fire? A flood? An explosion? What happens if your backup is scheduled at 3AM but your hard disk dies at 2:55? A home user can cope with this level of risk, but anyone whose data really truly matters (ie. people will lose lots of money/limbs if data is lost) should have a proper disaster recovery plan, offsite backups, replication, etc.
• You're trusting people not to destroy your backups. Generally the setup above will let anyone read or write the backups on the system if they have permissions to do so. Instead of setting the mountpoint to 755, you may want to run chmod 700 /mnt/backup. This means that only root can read or write the backup - but this may not be convenient. There is a solution but I decided it was overkill for my needs - I'm the only one using my PC and I trust myself not to destroy it all.
• This is not a versioning system. The snapshots let you go back a short way in time but think of this as a convenience thing ("Oh no! I really didn't want to delete that document two days ago!") rather than as a way of applying versioning. Use Subversion or CVS for this instead.

That said this was always going to read as an anti-smoker rant. If you're going to give someone a kicking you might as well use the hob nailed boots.

I tell you, the sooner we ban smokers the better. Those of a pedantic bent might suggest we ban smoking rather than smokers but I'm taking the hard line here. Frankly I am less concerned about the risks of second-hand smoke and the burden on the health service than I am about the mindless inconsiderate nature of some of the people who smoke.

But perhaps it's not their fault. Maybe they're not inconsiderate - they may just be retarded. You've got to be a few IQ points below par to willingly suck down that chemical-laden, tar-ridden smoke many times a day. When their own filthy habits start intruding into my life it may not be because they don't care, it's because they don't realise. Smoking clogs the arteries and the lungs - the reduction of blood flow to the brain is manifesting itself, that's all.

I have recently started working in central London. The thought process behind moving to our capital was nothing more complicated than "I have no idea what I want to do. I may as well move to London where there's plenty of stuff going on to keep me distracted." City life pulls me in two directions - I enjoy the sheer quantity of diversions and 24 hour services but I also miss the lush, verdant outdoors. Another pertinent side of me is that I treasure my lunch hours. I will take a full hour to sit down, eat, do the crossword, and read the paper. It is one of the anchor points of my day - possibly the only one. These seemingly unrelated factors combine to give me my lunchtime pursuit - sitting in one of London's many parks and eating.

Many other people have the same idea. On overcast days the parks are speckled with people, but when it's busy the places are rammed. That's OK - other people are allowed to like the outdoors as well. We can all sit in the park together and enjoy the trees and the grass, the slightly fresher air, and pretend for a brief slice of time that we're not surrounded by pollution and filth.

Only we can't pretend that, can we? The grass is covered in cigarette butts. London's cleaners do a sterling job keeping the pavement detritus at bay, but you can't brush grass clean. Even if we ignore your discarded dog-ends and settle on the grass we are faced with a larger problem. You see, there is a reason there are butts everywhere. There are smokers in the park too.

Like the lumberjack who works outside because he loves the outdoors, the smokers in the park think nothing of sparking up when they are a few short feet from you. They'll sit there happily puffing away while we try to eat our lunch. I came outside to enjoy what little fresh air I can find, not have it removed by some blonde bint in advertising who talks loudly about when she should text the man she danced with last weekend. This also puts me off my lunch but, admittedly, it may not be relevant.

I'm not bothered about the health issues. I'm not entirely convinced about banning smoking in pubs - it seems a mite hypocritical to protect someone's lungs while encouraging them to poison their livers. You go to a bar, you expect the smoke. The stinking hair and clothes along with the dry throat are the cost you pay for socialising in such locations. I don't expect that from my lunch break.

And how about the degenerate swines who smoke while walking along the street? Double points for having a mobile phone clamped to your ear and the cigarette in that hand so it's not even like you're feeding your nicotine habit. As you walk along and belch out clouds of smoke the poor sods behind you get it in the face every single time. You may think you're clever but one day I'm going to have your ankles. Then we'll see who's the smart one.

Australia has a campaign about cigarette butts. It's based around the slogans "Bin yer butts" and "Don't be a tosser". We need more of that type of wordplay in this country. Quality puns and insults for transgressors. The closest we come to this right now is the pleasure of telling people without seatbelts to belt up.

I don't think there's a solution beyond ghettoising smokers even further. Don't send them outside, where they congregate around doorways like mini smokestacks in their own cliquey industrial revolutions. Stick them in a sealed room in the basement with an air vent. No matter how good the filter is the air will be stale and the walls will yellow and peel. Better yet, put them in a vacuum. They're used to breathing problems and (thanks to the fire triangle) they won't be able to light up at all.

God, I wish I'd listened to my inner voice and run for the hills.

So, Crazy German Chick goes home to change and we agree to meet later. We meet, and warning sign #2 (#1 was her asking people on the street to go to a sports match) appears: it's the evening, and we're strictly non-participatory, and she's wearing lycra sports gear. Cycling shorts and a top, along with some ridiculous fingerless gloves. It's Adelaide in September so it's not the warmest of evenings - I was chilly. I look past this and we go to get the bus. Adelaide do this thing where you buy a day travelpass and that lets you use all public transport. I have one and so does she - we board the bus without incident. We make small talk for a while, until she notices some other people going to the game. CGC starts talking to them and asks for some of their alcohol. They laugh but she persists; eventually they give her the dregs of one of their cans. (Asking for alcohol from complete strangers: #3).

We get to the grounds and she chooses this moment to ask for money for the ticket. I point out she invited me because she had a ticket going to waste; she could have sold it to someone at the ground if she'd just wanted to get the cover price back. We haggle and settle for a few bucks off the cover price and I'd buy her a beer. CGC says OK, but tries to sell it to some random bystanders anyway.

We get into the game and find our seats. Although she said she was a fan of the AFL she doesn't know the rules. This doesn't bother her but it bothers me - I like to know what I'm watching. I start talking to the people next to me and get them to explain the rules. Then the game starts. CGC's true nutbar quality starts to shine.

"Go the Crows!" she bellows. Completely at random, throughout the game. People around her were giving her that "Is this person dangerous or merely weird?" look. When people at a football match are looking at you for making too much noise... oh my (#4). At one point she started shouting for a team that wasn't even playing. I pointed this out to CGC. "Well, they must play sometime," she replied (#5). Then she starts cheering for animal rights (#6... I'm not going to keep track any more, we're beyond warning signs now). I'm all for them but I don't see where they enter into a sports match.

But that wasn't the worst part. At least during those moments she was watching the game. See, CGC has decided that I'm a hottie, and she wants a piece. Oh, how she wants a piece. She keeps playing with my hair and telling me "You look cute." At one point she even climbs onto my lap. No thank you! Eventually her pestilent advances get far too much and I fabricate a girlfriend for myself.

"You're very cute."
"Yeah, my girlfriend thinks so too."
"Aww, You have a girlfriend?"
"Yeah, I do."
"Are you... committed?"
"Oh, very much so."

This does not deter her, and I must fend off advances for the entire match. I figure "In for a penny in for a pound," and start fabricating an entire backstory for myself. I'm a 26 year old Scorpio from Birmingham with a job, and so on. I made damn sure she didn't get my surname.

CGC wanders off intermittently, presumably to harrass other members of the crowd, and I breathe a sigh of relief and apologise to the people around me. "She's not with you?" "God no. I'm an unwilling bystander." It's a cold night and I'm chilly. I have a jumper, but it's not doing a vast amount of good. She tries to borrow it occasionally and I explain that no, sorry, it's mine and I'm cold. "Not very gentlemanly," she says. "Well, I'm no gentleman, and you're the one who went to change and came back in tiny lycra."

Eventually the match ends. Port Adelaide got crushed - the game had some entertaining moments but they were very much outclassed. The Adelaide fans are ecstatic; the Port Adelaide fans downcast. We leave the stadium and go to queue up for the bus back to the town centre. CGC starts talking to random people in the queue again; she talks to a morose-looking man with a painted face and head to toe in blue about how much she enjoyed the game and what a good match it was. Similar foot-in-mouth incidents go on for the whole queue but for the most part everything goes fine. Nobody punches her and most people are taking her inane comments in good humour. She panics about not getting a bus and I explain that it's a football match - people will have thought of this. This bus is full but there will be another along in 3 minutes that will be empty, and so on until the stadium is deserted.

We get towards the head of the queue and it's obvious we're going to get onto the next bus. It draws up and people start getting on. It's about 80% full and there are 3 people in front of us. Despite having queued quite patiently up until this point CGC walks past them all, up to the end of the bus without sticking her ticket in the machine, and sits down. A situation is brewing. In the UK if you did this a couple of bag ladies would tut; Australians are not reserved. Why would she ever do this, anyway? She has a valid ticket! She would have got on! The entire bus is now pissed off at her. I wait like a good little Brit and get on, validate my ticket, and explain to the bus driver that she's kind of with me and I'll sort it out.

I go up to the back of the bus where an angry Aussie is in her face. I explain that she does have a valid ticket, and she should go and validate it. Yes, you're on the bus, but there are a lot of people on the bus who hate you and think you're not paying, so for God's sake go and put your ticket in the machine. No buts, go and do it now. She acquiesces and does so; the hostility reduces a little.

She starts to walk back up the bus towards me. In front of her is a heavy-set, middle-aged woman. She's another Port Adelaide fan. Not only is she in blue, but she's got some of those chunky radio headphones on and a big furry jester hat. CGC thinks it would be a good idea to steal the hat - she reaches out and grabs the hat, but gets the headphones too. The woman's just got on the bus so has no idea that CGC is a live one, and she was grabbed from behind so she's got no idea what's going on. The hostility on the bus is back.

"What the bloody hell do you think you're doing!" she bellows at her. CGC looks clueless - what, you're angry? Why? I roll my eyes and jump in again to defuse things, telling myself I only have 30 minutes more of this at most. I tell her to give the hat back, and she does. I apologise for her behaviour but the lady is much smarter than she looks - she refuses to spread her anger around. "It's not you I'm bothered about, it's her!" She tells CGC that she shouldn't be allowed out, and I tell Mrs PA that I agree.

The rest of the bus ride back is uneventful apart from the entire bus staring at her. She's still going on about my girlfriend, and trying to coax me off with her. There's one more incident that sticks in my mind, when she makes a sudden inocuous move and I flinch bigtime. I was that paranoid about what she could do. I lie: two more incidents. She starts eating her bus ticket. God knows why, as she needs it to get home. I try to dissuade her, but it's not my problem so I don't intervene when she carries on.

We get off the bus at the central station and I take the picture I linked to above. I took it for "Yes officer, that's the woman," purposes, as well as to prove to people that she really existed. She tries once more to talk me into coming home with her and to hug me, I rebuff her, and dash off into the station before she can gather her wits to follow me.

Originally published on Kuro5hin.

When I was around 14 I discovered the wonders of coffee. That was an adult, a metropolitan drink! The caffeine hit and the social cachet appealed to my adolescent mind and with typical pretentiousness I would bring a flask of it to school with me. These days I no longer drink it.

No, these days I like my tea. Not your PG tips and your Tetley's - these are still a bore. Consider it my own rebellion against the British side of myself. I like the herbal teas and the fruit teas. My word, they're wonderful. This summer I went travelling around Australia and ended up staying for two weeks with a young lady and her father. They got fresh camomile and brewed it up in a clear teapot, straining the flowers out when a cup is poured. I loved it. There's no teabag that comes close to it that I have found. Fortunately, mediocre camomile is still pretty good.

There are other teas I like. My love affair with fruit teas goes back a couple of years to when I was heavily involved with the student union. The University catering service would leave their individually wrapped fruit teabags lying around in meeting rooms after their meetings and I would have meetings afterwards. Well there was no point letting it go to waste, was there? A broad range of fruit teas were there for the taking. The other day I happened across a similar abandoned meeting refreshments table, and my box of fruit tea is now nicely augmented. I particularly recommend anything with a citrus fruit, though they're all good.

A new favourite of mine is jasmine tea. I had a cup of this in a pub recently (I know, I know. What kind of prat drinks tea in a pub? Pleased to meet you) and it was amazing. I went to my local Chinese grocery store and bought a cheap box. It's not up to the standard of the pub stuff, so more experimentation is needed and possible cross-examination of barmaids. Its deficiencies in taste are made up for somewhat through the aesthetic of this particular brand - that peculiar exoticism of something predominantly foreign. What's on the packet in English is translated with typical Chinese aplomb. It's declared as a product of the Fujian Tea Import & Export Co., Ltd. and each individual bag describes itself as Aromatic Flavour Clear Infusion Homely Refresher Ideal Gift.

At present I am not buying any new tea. I have boxes and boxes of the stuff - well over a hundred teabags in my cupboard right now. I'm moving out in a little under a month, and am trying to get through at least 3 cups a day (I am failing) as it feels faintly ridiculous to move teabags with me. My cache was not helped thanks to an overly-helpful supermarket. I had ordered 40 organic camomile teabags, as they had a far better taste than the non-organic kind. Of course they were out of stock and I got 40 non-organic ones. So now I've got at least 2 months of mediocre camomile to drink before I can get back to the nice stuff. Drat.

Originally published on Kuro5hin.

Thus I shall soon be exploring the land down under. Like most non-Aussies, I had very little idea what's actually there. I could tell you the names of some Australian cities and that the capital is Canberra (reputed to be immensely boring). As for tourist attractions, careful thought gave me four: the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Ayer's Rock, and surfing. Beyond that, I was ignorant.

A little research soon showed me that Australia is a dangerous place. In fact, I am not convinced I'll make it out alive. The uninitiated here might presume that I'm talking about sweltering heat and psychopaths murdering backpackers, but I think it would be missing the point to focus on these. It would be like James Bond worrying about tetanus when the buzzsaw is about to bisect him. Given its habit of rising and setting on a regular basis, the sun can be anticipated and worked around. Likewise, everywhere has its lunatics and as long as you avoid places where they congregate - France, for example - you're going to be safe. No, it turns out that every plant and animal on that continent is out to get you.

You have the obvious examples, of course. The dangers of sharks and crocodiles are well-known, thanks to Hollywood and confectionery. Most people have a passing aquaintance with the kangaroo, which has a habit of bounding across roads and getting hit by cars much to the detriment of all concerned. You also have the wombat, a kind of armoured teddy bear with similar habits but the infuriating propensity to walk away unscathed from such collisions while your car gently smoulders and your insurance premiums skyrocket. There are snakes and spiders, too - given that the arachnid's diet is small insects, providing them with enough venom to drop a rhino seems a little OTT. Let me regale you with a couple of tales about lesser-known risks:

First up, we have a critter known as the box jellyfish. These live around the northern coastlines of Australia, and are transparent - as are their 130-foot long tentacles. If you get stung by one of these critters and are lucky, you will have a red mark where you were stung for the rest of your life. If you're unlucky, you die or go insane. One chap who got stung was screaming even while sedated and unconcious. It's safe to say that these bastards hurt.
Next we have the Gympie-Gympie tree. This has big, heart-shaped leaves with lots of tiny strands on them similar to fibreglass. If you brush against one of these leaves, they break off and get under your skin where they excrete a rather toxic substance. Standard hospital policy is to sedate victims for four days to get them over the worst of it, and it takes 6 months for the fibres to work their way out of the body. You can feel them for those 6 months too.

Please remember that this is a country where people voluntarily settle. People decide that a life of checking the toilet for dunny spiders before evacuating their bowels and shaking out shoes is for them. There are risks in Australia that no-one even knows about - it's such a vast, unexplored country that no-one really knows what's in there. It is liberally spattered with small, clandestine ways to cause you immense pain and probable death. I am likely to spend my trip with an unhealthy dose of paranoia and it's possible I will spend all 7 weeks wimpering in the airport waiting for a flight home.

There is, however, a surprising amount to do in Australia. From what I've read, it does seem a fascinating country. For a start, lots and lots of things about it are unexplained. No-one really knows where the Aborigines came from. They are 60,000 years old (3 times as old as other homo sapiens). Australia has always been an island, and has no indigenous apes from which the Aborigines could evolve. The implication is clear - 60,000 years ago there was a seafaring civilisation while the rest of us plebs were trying to figure out how to bang rocks together. There are 12 foot earthworms, trees 18 metres in diameter, and random evolutionary oddities like the platypus. And no-one has the foggiest idea just why somewhere as hostile as Australia would be teeming with such things. It's as if it were God's scrapbook.

Aside from the fact that I'm going to die out there, I am looking forward to experiencing Australian life. I hear it's a very friendly country, and I plan to spend some five weeks backpacking around. The Australian attitude to Aborigines is somewhat odd, it seems - from what I've read they are basically ignored. Animals that would cause me to wet myself in fear are a fact of life over there. There are huge distances between places as well as a massive cultural diversity between different cities and states, and ever since the White Australia policy went away in the 70s the ethnic diversity has exploded too. As a teetotal vegan I expect to be regarded with some confusion - drinking seems integral to the antipodean culture, as well as a fondness for grilled meat. I'm hoping that the Aussies will see me as a mysterious foreign stranger, as opposed to yet another pasty-white Brit backpacker. Whether I am a sex symbol or a sex object (when I ask people for sex, they object) to the .au hotties remains to be seen.

In short, it should be rather interesting.