Does this feel a bit like a scorched earth policy to anyone else?

Those following the ongoing particle physics and astronomy funding saga may wish to take a look at this.

As Paul said, "It's from the House of Commons select committee, so it is full of words. Skip ahead to 'Legacy issues' for the good bit."

In other news, I had an absolutely wonderful birthday weekend in Germany. The weather was fabulous, my parents took us out for dinner on Friday and we had very nice steak, I got to catch up with Susi whom I hadn't seen in (we reckon) about 7 years, got to spend time with the parental overunits and teach them English and Paul Bulgarian, had a barbecue and lots of lovely birthday cake my Mum made.

That's pretty good going, given that halfway through Thursday I was convinced I'd be spending the weekend in Heathrow Terminal 5. Shockingly, we did survive the T5 experience and the luggage got both to Frankfurt and back to Newcastle on the same flights we were on. Comedy bits included that pre-landing preparation for T5 video that BA now play on their flights, rebooting the aircraft on the way out (admittedly not technically a problem with the terminal itself), BA's new bin bags as part of the inflight meal (this is probably a separate rant), and the security shenanigans. Suffice to say if whoever designed the place had designed it less like a shopping mall and more like an airport, they'd have half as many problems now.

After repeatedly running out of shelf space, Paul and I have decided to take the ultimate step in relationship commitment[1]: We are getting rid of duplicate (and some plain unwanted) books.

So, I've got some stuff going free to a good home. A couple of things to note first:

1. This is being posted to a number of places and I will be allocating stuff on a perfectly arbitrary basis. You have a better chance of securing an item if you can give me a good or entertaining reason for why you want it.
2. Delivery of items will be somewhat haphazard. If I'm likely to see you (or someone who sees you regularly) in the near-ish future, I'll hold on to the item until then. Else, I'll happily post it as long as you don't mind buying me a beverage of my choice (Let's face it, it's most likely to be peppermint tea; hot chocolate if I'm feeling particularly decadent.) to compensate for postage at some point.

So, free to a good home:

Gravitation (manga, shonen-ai) volumes 1 and 2 Ailsa-chan
Gerard & Jacques (manga, yaoi) volume 1 Ailsa-chan
Shirahime-Syo (manga) Ailsa-chan
Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind almosthonest
Naked Empire by Terry Goodkind almosthonest
The Fellowship of the Ring Visual Companion (film tie-in thingy) Meri
Queen of the Slayers by Nancy Holder (Buffy novelisation) Meri
Slayer - The Next Generation (unofficial guide to Buffy season 6) Meri
Slayer (unofficial guide to Buffy) Meri
Coraline by Neil Gaiman, hardcover copy
Coraline by Neil Gaiman, paperback copy with illustrations by Dave McKean morgaine_x
(Yes, we did have three copies between the two of us. It's a long story.)
Ein Lied fuer Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay (German translation, the official, unabridged version)
A promotional extract from The Portable Door by Tom Holt
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (somewhat elderly copy which I picked up second-hand a while ago) Claire
(We are actually keeping 4 other copies of The Hobbit. ;-)
The Wake by Neil Gaiman (That's Sandman Volume 10, and it's the old cover.)
A pile of 7 assorted promotional comics

Anything not claimed by the end of next week gets taken to the local charity shop.

[1] At least until our assets exceed the inheritance tax allowance, at which point a trip to the registrar's office will become unavoidable.

I was browsing my local Borders yesterday and came across yet another book that claimed to be "the new Tolkien" or something to that effect.

I do wish publishers would realise that if I wanted to read Tolkien, I'd read Tolkien. Christopher has made sure that we have years' worth of the old man's stuff to read if we're that way inclined. I can't help but think that to anybody who actually wants to read Tolkien, any book marketed as "the new Tolkien" is probably a disappointment, and the rest of us actually want to read stuff that's well written and has characters that are better drawn than the landscape. But hey, maybe it's just me.

[This post was brought to you but the mind-numbing boredom of writing documentation.]

ETA: almosthonest has reminded me of another effect this kind of marketing has: I wonder how many good books I'm missing out on because I wouldn't touch something labelled "the new Tolkien" with a barge pole. The "new Tolkien" kind of marketing used to work for me when I was a teenager. It is, for instance, how I got to Guy Gavriel Kay. But Kay really really isn't the "new Tolkien". Yes, the Fionavar Tapestry is in many ways a Lord of the Rings Mary Sue. But it's a damn well written one, with characters! And the rest of Kay's book are nothing like Tolkien, even though they do occasionally end up getting that wretched blurb on the cover. So yeah, how many horribly mis-marketed books are there out there that I'm missing out on?

A friend asked me how EasterCon was, and I wrote this: (slightly modified):

Neil Gaiman was one of the ones who were safe from my fangirling, as were Charlie Stross, Christopher Priest (but only just), Geoff Ryman, and Paul Cornell. Did fangirl badly at China Mieville (who continues to be hot and has the the most amazingly huge vocabulary in the universe, which I'm told led to some amusement at the Lovecraft panel), Mike Carey, and Brian Talbot.

Overall very good convention, though I did crash pretty badly around 5pm on Sunday (exacerbated by a bad case of drama later that evening) and only partially recovered yesterday (though audience participation pure maths helped ;-). Note to self: not leaving the hotel between midday on Friday and half 4pm on Monday is a Bad Thing. My panels went okay but not brilliantly for a number of reasons including truly crap moderation and bad scheduling.

Highlights (too many to mention?): Guest of Honour speeches by China Mieville, Charlie Stross and Neil Gaiman (who also read two pieces); aforementioned audience participation maths (academic track is awesome); being the only girl in the room for the Accelerando book discussion; the "Hovercraft of Disbelief" panel which had some very funny rants; being able to quote T3: "The firewalls are holding!" in the Physics mistakes item; the alien jazz band; aforementioned fangirling at Mike Carey; the play (not quite as superb as last year's but very good nonetheless); leaving the con, after many trips to the dealers' room, with 20 new books between the two of us; catching up with friends and making new ones.

Disappointments: The panel on religion in SF, featuring The Worst Atheist Ever (Religion and religious characters have no place in SF. Full Stop.) and The Worst Buddhist Ever (Lack of religious belief about "afterlife" consequences of your actions == lack of morals.) as well as bad sound and a disruptive audience, and also David Southwood who was interesting but didn't really seem to have an overarching theme.

Overall I'm leaving this Eastercon with two thoughts:

1. The schizophrenia of the genre today, which in so many ways reflects the schizophrenia of the world we live in. There was a very strong track around the whole climate change issue (some of which I attended and some of which I declared to be too depressing) and what we think the future will look like. At the same time people like Charlie Stross happily went on about how Moore's Law may or may not hold true for another x years, what that will mean for society and whether/when we'll hit the singularity - without any reference to the possibility that, actually, it might not happen because we'll fry the planet first. Though apparently they have now managed to get more energy out of fusion than they put in (by a very small margin and for all of 2 seconds).

2. Space is dead. It's hit me for the first time, that as of now, space travel and space colonisation (possibly as opposed to space science and exploration of the solar system) really are dead and there's very little hope of revival. And that, too, is reflected in the genre.

Neither of these are happy thoughts, but they certainly are food for further thought. Interesting.

Also, I was somewhat amused when Charlie Stross was talking about location-specific context overlays facilitated by GPS as the technology of the future. I've been waiting for these since rockus_at did a concept development piece on them at the International Space University six years ago.

No, it still hasn't sunk in. But at the same time, in some ways, my brain feels like it's going to explode. All combined with a tight-deadline project ramping up at work, and my ongoing heating troubles makes for a rather dysfunctional Mili at the moment.

In other news, Arthur C. Clarke is dead. And all my local bookshops had run out of copies of Neil Gaiman's World Book Day effort "Odd and the Frost Giants". So I ordered it from Amazon, and to make the order up to the free deliver £15 mark, I added, among others, Clarke's collected short stories. It seemed appropriate, and it's been on my wishlish for ages.

What with all that, I'd quite like to curl up and not do or think about anything much now. Ah well, we don't always get what we want.

My uncle died yesterday. He was (if I'm not mistaken) about 4 days younger than my mother, and a few months younger than my father. He leaves behind a mother, a sister, a wife and a 10-year-old son whose lives have just completely fallen apart.

I liked my uncle - after I got over the phase when I was terrified of his beard at the age of 3. When I was a child/teenager, my aunt and uncle's house was one of the places where I always had fun, where the jokes never seemed to stop.

I have vague memories of being flower girl and my aunt and uncle's wedding, aged 4 or so. I remember sitting in their garden, playing cards. He was the first person to take me to a deserted car park and let me drive their car - I was maybe 12 and failed miserably though the car and passengers were unharmed.

There were many things I didn't agree with him on. But he was a good man, as good a husband and father as anyone, and he leaves a hole in our family which will be difficult, if not impossible to fill.

Rosen Marinov, rest in peace.

I'm going to de-lurk for a minute to comment on all the drama... (This has been promoted from a comment elsewhere.)

I'm going to put my cynical hat on for a minute.

You know what the problem with LJ is? It's the fact that the basic account isn't sufficiently crippled. Look at stuff like Flickr and LibraryThing where the free account lets only have 200 photos/books. The paid-for service is then good enough and adds sufficient value while being reasonably priced, that people fork out the money for it.

With LJ, the basic account functionality allows you to do all you really ever need to do. I don't *need* a bazillion user icons. I don't *need* to do polls. I don't *need* to post by email (unless work suddenly decides to block the LJ root domain ;). They are nice to have extras but they don't add sufficient value over the basic package to be worth paying for.

Now, I'm not saying that suddenly crippling the basic account to, say, 2 posts a week is the way to go. The expectation has been set over the years with the users that the basic necessary functionality will be free to them, and see what happens when they try to tamper with it. But had they done the Flickr thing from the start, no one would have complained. (Or course, arguably there's more money in ads than in user subscriptions anyway.)

And yeah, they could really really do with a PR department that has some fucking clue and doesn't treat the users like morons.

Anyway, I'll now take my cynical hat off and go get some breakfast.

Thanks for the good wishes everyone.

Actually writing out the good, the bad and the ugly helped somewhat to focus on the good. Let's face it, my Dad being okay, and me getting home in time to hug Paul last night is worth a hell of a lot more than car trouble and an accounting course.

Turns out the accounting course wasn't so bad either, and missing the first 2 hours brought it up just to the right level of challenging. ;-)

Mr Brum now has a confirmed mysterious current drain (fingers were vaguely pointed at the alternator) so needs to see a doctor, ideally this week. I'm not mightily fussed about this, just need to organise it.

My luggage was eventually delivered by BA and is currently downstairs in the office luggage room. Now I just need to take it home and dig up my medicine and take it.

Overall, I'm busy but pretty happy.

The good:

My Dad did not have a heart attack. He spent a week in hospital and had lots of tests done, the end result being that his heart is very well for a man his age and that he has some stress-related stomach problems. Working on de-stressing him.

This year seems to have started a lot better in terms of family relationships, with no drama at all, and I actually had a very good weekend in Germany.

After a bit of a nightmare journey, I did make it home last night (this morning? It was half 1 am) and got see Paul for all of 15 minutes before we both curled up to sleep.

The bad:

My luggage, which contains things such as the charger for my mobile (battery of which is flat), essential medicine, my toothbrush and my work badge, and the obligatory knitting project (all my knitting projects seem to end up well-travelled and left behind somewhere these days) didn't make it last night. Everyone's best guess is that while I could run across Heathrow in 15 minutes to catch the second delayed flight, my luggage didn't make it, and should be on its way up on the first flight this morning to be delivered at work...

...where I am not because Mr Brum's battery is completely flat again. Waiting for RAC to turn up and hopefully replace it this time. Mr Brum also needs to see an electrician.

The truly ugly:

Right now, I'm meant to be in day one of a two-day basic bookkeeping course. On all of 4 hours of sleep. And I'm not, because I can't get to work until the RAC turn up. And it looks like I'm missing most of the first morning. And ARGH.

I finished volume 4 of the Merchant Princes, and Mr Stross is only just writing volume 5. *sulk*

Philosophy essay standard intro: "Ever since man..."

Economics essay standard intro: "Ever since money..."

But how the hell do you start a piece of writing about project management? Well, courtesy of PM College (No, don't bother spending money on them), we now have an answer:

"As a profession, project management is as old as civilization. Projects such as the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Wall of China, undertaken centuries ago, required massive amounts of labor and material, logistics, planning, and money."

Yeah, and I bet the Egyptians paid attention to what people were actually saying, rather than just their body language and tone of voice.

Happy New Year everyone! :-)

I had a lot of respect for Benazir Bhutto, both as a person and a politician.

( Year Review Meme )

So, furniture was delivered yesterday and Chili and I moved into our new home. It's all still a bit of a mess, but the bed is functional, the fridge works, the heating works, the shower is awesome and I'm sure we'll sort out the boxes soon too.

Top priorities currently are curtains, screwing the book cases to the walls so I can actually put stuff on them and buying new inlet hoses for the washing machine as the old ones a leaking. Oh, and finding the power sockets int he lounge so I can plug in the telly. I suspect they're behind a stack of boxes.

I was very proud of myself for wiring in the cooker without killing myself (Chili helped). Haven't actually used it properly yet, just turned it on briefly to see if it worked, so things may yet go up in flames. ;-)

What really doesn't help is that I'm going to Germany tomorrow for a long weekend, but Paul's coming in on Friday night to be a Magic Stuff Fairy and hopefully get some tidying done.

I am extremely displeased with the quality of the packing done by the removals company. So far we've had a broken lamp and some damage to other stuff. They just threw stuff into boxes without bothering to wrap it, or checking whether object A in the box is likely to damage object B in the same box. Putting a book which weighs about 10kg on top of a fragile statue is not a good plan. I shall be phoning up to complain and ask for an insurance claim form.

Chili seems to be settling in okay. He's been especially snuggly, spent some of the night sleeping on top of me and the rest walking on me. I think he disapproves of the laminate flooring in the kitchen and bathroom and the floorboards in the lounge as they make zooming about somewhat difficult. Hopefully I'll be able to clear some floorspace in the carpeted rooms soon for him to run about in.

In other news, I seem to be over the worst of my little cold. Cough syrup is stopping me from coughing my lungs out, and while my voice still sounds entertaining, speaking doesn't hurt quite so much anymore.

Dear Lazywebs,

It was about this time last year that I realised that I actually quite like Christmas carols, no matter what I think of the rest of the whole Christmas thing. Can anyone recommend a good compilation of Christmas carols please?

Yours,
Mili

In other news, I've now sent in my PMI audit materials; sent our latest thoughts on the will to the solicitor (for her to look at and phone me going, "Are you really sure that's what you meant?" ;-), and my work plan doesn't look quite as scary as it did the other day (mainly because I've managed to break down a few big scary things into smaller, more manageable chunks).

Right. Now off to the new house to hand keys to the decorator, then to the gym.