I need a holiday! (by alaric)

This year, I've been alternating between bleak depression and enthusiastic elation.

Luckily, it's easy to see a pattern - the elation is when I let myself get distracted by interesting things; the depression is when I have to tear my attention back to what needs to be done rather than what I feel like doing!

It's been a funny year. On the one hand we've moved into a much larger house, with much better facilities, that's warmer and easier to keep clean and tidy. My work is great, and I've managed to catch up on some things that have been hanging over me for years - tax paperwork, terminating my limited company (that had become nothing more than a thorn in my side since I stopped freelancing), simplifying and upgrading my server setup, tidying up my home directory and organising my life. On the other hand, I've been so busy that the new home has mainly been a place to eat and sleep rather than something I've had much chance to enjoy, and I'm behind on the (small, reasonable) list of projects I wanted to do this year - with no year left to do them; I've so far spent only a handful of days on my own projects in the entire year.

I spent a whole day sorting out my workshop on my birthday in April, and ended that day with a few little things to finish off - which are still waiting for me. I've not finished the ring casting, which should only take a couple more days, nor rebuilt my furnace, which should take a few days more.

I've done a bit better on computer-based projects as I can do them wherever I have my laptop; I've done some work on my fiction project, and made progress on my organisational infrastructure to convert a huge pile of "things that need investigating to even begin to decide what needs doing about them" into a tractable TODO list, and done some writing for the ARGON project web site.

But, with my ability to concentrate on what I'm supposed to be doing rapidly waning, it's clear that I need some time off. So, I've booked the week before Christmas off of work, and I hope to:

1. Do what I can to fix the roof in the workshop.

   • It leaks. This will be hard to fix properly, as it'll require spending lots of money on materials; and possibly can't be done until there's some warmer, drier, weather to dry the decking out. But I'll see if I can improve on the current bodge somewhat, at least to give the decking a chance to dry properly without regular re-soakings.
   • There's great big gaps in the eaves, all round the walls, varying from a centimetre up to about twenty centimetres, through which an icy wind blows. All the warm air from the heater disappears, and ivy creeps in. I need to seal them up (minus a controllable air vent to let out humid air and fumes from welding - perhaps an air vent plus an extractor fan with a fume hood would be the way to go in the long run). I plan to saw some strips of wood to length so they can go between the rafters, nail them in place, and use judicious amounts of sealant to keep the tenacious ivy at bay and to account for my general inability to cut wood to exact lengths properly.

2. Run Ethernet to the workshop so I have an Internet connection there. This will involve spending some money on outdoor-suitable conduit and fittings, and trunking for the interior runs, then drilling lots of holes in walls and running cables through and sealing the gaps. But the result will be that I can actually do computer work at a desk with a comfy chair, rather than hunched over a laptop on the sofa with children tugging at me.

3. Start building the computer infrastructure in the workshop. I'm looking at a battery-backed low-voltage power system feeding a Raspberry Pi (which I already have, waiting - Sarah got me one for my birthday), bristling with sensors. Because sensors are fun.

4. If the weather and time permit, work on my ring casting and the furnace, although that somewhat requires dry weather. We'll see.

5. Chill out, play computer games, write fiction and ARGON prose.

6. Order the bits to build a chord keyer - I doubt I'll have time to build it by the time they arrive in the post, so I'm saving that for a project I can do at Bristol Hackspace in the new year.

But I need to take care that next year isn't like this one. Taking on so many responsibilities that I struggle to maintain my productivity means I get less stuff done, not more, and makes it hard to prioritise my effort sensibly. I'm going to book three weekend days each month, in advance, for my projects or simple relaxation, rather than just thinking I'll do them "when I get a free day" only to find that all of my weekends are booked up months in advance. I'll be open to rearranging them in order to fit around the days when Sarah or the children need me, or we're visiting people for events - most of the time, it doesn't matter what actual day I do things on. Sometimes this will involve getting a whole weekend, and then just a single day at the other end of a month; that's fine, just as long as it lets me keep making progress on my projects, and giving me a chance to unwind from the stresses of constantly doing what I must do, rather than what I want to do.

Fandom (by sarah)

I have a couple of hundred fans, this is odd, it's weird in some cases and has already led a few years ago to issues that was quiet scary. I refused to meet up with someone as I felt they were being too fanatical and this resulted in a hate campaign against me. This was resolved mainly due to the behaviour being against the law.

This has not put me off of having fans as most of them are lovely and more so a lot of them have become friends in one form or another and with some of them the fandom is mutual. Add in social media and the fact I take part in various author/writers chats and I end up talking to C J Cherryh and Anne Rice and the like in recipricol conversations. The same goes for the science writers and artists and in some cases bands.

Now I have a mix on my various feds of people I know and people I don't but who's work I like - people I suppose I am a fan of. Mainly it is people I find inspiring or interesting. But I don't tend to follow the fashions as it were so I don't really know who is famous and who is not. I have countless stories of me turning down going for noodles with someone who was going of to have lunch with Nick Cave and of informing Cory Doctorow that his coat was really zippy and that I liked it. Al has tried to tell writers that I am a writer too and I have just shrugged and said things like, 'yeah but its only scifi and horror and a bit of poetry', and this years piece de la resistance turning down the chance to read my poetry out to a room full of important and famous people as I had Jean with me and she needed to be in bed early as she had a jujistu tournament the next day - with hind sight this are miss chances but I just don't really segment people in my head.

I am my own worst enermy and have even suffered the 'oh my god I have fans and they expect the same stuff from me all the time... I can't do that!' when I first found out people were reading this blog I struggled to continue and by people I don't mean our friends we'd told about it but all the others who had found us and found what we had to say interesting. And then I found the oppersite, the feeling that I was only writing to audience and that I could not be true to self as it might offend or bore or worse upset my mother. These were the demons of fandom as I saw it.

After the stalker incident I did worry and I stepped back a bit from public stuff both real life and electronic as I was realised that I feared becoming too famous (I know it's unlikely that that would happen and that it is probably arrogent to think that way but I am giving you my thought process here). How much did I want to be in the public eye etc... but I couldn't not write so I tried a psydonyme and that worked and got me back on track.

Part of me is always nervous of being 'fan-like' about people who's work I admire, having had the stalker, and others who hate my stuff and yet others who think everything I do is amazing and just stare at me waiting for me to say something. And then I realised that I am in this sort of bizar state of mind where the whole world is a sort of extended village for me. Social media has shrunk things but so has the activities I take part in in the physical world. I go and see my friends play and I tweet them to say I enjoyed it as I had to leave before the end of the concert to catch the train and then I go and see Gotye and do pretty much exactly the same thing.

I just find the concept of fans and fandom and fanfic and everything a bit strange even though I am part of it from two different sides.

Of course being shy means that I get as nervous over saying hello to the girl who had organised the charity performance I did Thursday night as I did when meeting members of the Royal Family.

This is something I puzzled over after the weekend as well, I get prizes for my art, I get them shown at International Conferences and so on and yet in a village that I lived in for 6 years... meh. It's like the issue of me being invited to read in Oxford and Bristol and so on and yet the towns near me.... I get completely over looked. Part of it is going to be that I am not main stream so I suppose that I am not in an area with enough population density to have people who appreciate my work.

Voting in the Police (by sarah)

Today I am popping out to vote - this time police commissioners. I really don't like this - not that I have a choice of vote but that it is linked to political parties. I like the fact that our police force is separate otherwise they are just a branch of the military in my opinion or hired thugs - with issues such as privatization sneaking in I am very concerned.

The police need to be separate and a public service, I don't want people with the power of arrest over me that are doing it for the highest bidder or because one faction has decreed it so. I want them to be looking out for the polis - the people. I want them to retain the power to retain those in power in the country if those people are misbehaving - if those people are paying them then that balance shifts.

I've been looking at Gloucestershires candidates and only one of them is an ex-cop. Now I'm not saying the others can't do the job but I am fearful that you could get such a position without at least seeing what it is like to work on the 'shop floor' as it were.

Also the information for this round of voting has been almost none existant - you need to be internet savy to have gained any info on who is even standing in your area. This is not how you get people to actually go out and vote. Now I hate the leaflets through the door that are party specific but really a summary sheet with more info can be found here and here covering the basics of the candidates would be a good idea.

Democracy is more than being able to put your mark on the card it is being given the power to make an informed choice. I will go bannanas if I find flyers for specific parties in the booth again like I did with the voting referendum.

In the process of looking up info I have also discovered that there is planned closer of like two thirds of this counties police stations - who could possibly think that is a good idea? Centralisation can only make this effecient up to a level and then you start to have issues with time lag which when we are dealing with the emergency services is bad news indeed.

We have already lost our fire station which was also a place for the rapid response units etc.... it is now too far away for me to happy. As in it is now as far away as the nearest was when we lived in a village - village is one thing this is not a village. High population centers need visible policing. I saw more cops in the village than I do here - what is going on with that?

I am once again scared by the politics in this country.

Static Typing (by alaric)

I read this fine blog post

And this is precisely what is wrong with dynamically typed languages: rather than affording the freedom to ignore types, they instead impose the bondage of restricting attention to a single [sum] type!

Ah, bless. The author means well, but is confusing matters. They're kind of right that the distinction between so-called "dynamically typed languages" and so-called "statically typed languages" isn't what people think it is, but I think they've still not quite grasped it, either.

Certainly, almost all languages have types of some kind (the only real exceptions are ones that directly operate on memory as an array of bits, and expect the user to request the interpretation of any given region of memory in each operation, such as assembly language). So-called "dynamically typed languages" (let's call them SCDTLs from now on, and SCSTLs for so-called "statically typed languages") usually have numbers, and strings, and so on as separate types. What is missing in them compared to SCSTLs is the ability to say "This variable will only ever hold variables of a given type"; and the argument of the author is that, therefore, SCDTLs force every variable to be of a single "could be anything" type, while SCSTLs let you be more expressive. And in an SCSTL you could indeed create a big sum type of everything and use that for all your variables and, pow, it'd be just like a SCDTL, once you'd written all the clunky wrappers around stuff like addition to throw a run-time error if the arguments aren't all numeric, and unbox them from the sum type, and box the result up. Oh, and you need to maintin your giant Anything Sum Type, adding any user-defined types to it

That's what the author omits to mention. SCDTLs have all this automatic machinery to do that for you, while in SCSTLs you need to do it by hand! Eugh!

Working with sum types is useful. It's handy for writing programming tools such as generic container data structures. SCSTLs tend to have tools such as parametric types to act as a short-cut around the difficulties of doing that stuff with explicit sum types, but it boils down to the same kind of thing under the hood.

Now, a lot of the rhetoric around SCSTLs via SCDTLs comes from a rather blinkered viewpoint, comparing something like PHP (almost everything fails at run time!) to something like C (sum types are like pulling teeth!) - both sides have come together a long way.

Haskell is perhaps the shining example of a SCSTL nowadays, with its polymorphism and parametric typeclasses offering advanced ways to express huge sum types without having to spell them out.

And from the SCDTLs side, Common Lisp lets you declare the types of variables when you want, meaning that they are assigned the "Anything" sum type by default, but you can narrow them down when required. That gives you the convenience of an automatically-specified and automatically-unboxed Anything sum type when you want it, plus the static checkability (and efficient compilation) of finer-grained types when you want them. (And Chicken Scheme's new scrutinizer and specialisation system is a rapidly-developing example of a similiar model for Scheme, too).

And there's no reason why the SCSTLs can't come further, with an inbuilt Anything type and automatic boxing and unboxing of sum types, and more flexible type systems that can express more subtle distinctions, reducing the cases where "it's just too complex and we need to go dynamic".

Then we'll meet in the middle, and the only difference will be that SCDTLs have a syntax where type declarations are optional and default to Anything, while SCSTLs have a syntax that makes you declare types, even if they're Anything. They'll largely become interchangeable, and instead, we'll compare languages' type systems on a different scale: how complicated they are.

You see, Haskelll's type system can be hard to understand. It's quite complicated, in an attempt to be able to statically describe all the sorts of cases where people might wish they had a SCDTL instead. The development of type systems has largely been one of dealing with this; starting with things like generic container classes, then getting into complex stuff about being able to make the types of parts of a product type dependent on the values of other other members and whatnot, fine-grained types such as "odd integer", and so on. As SCDTLs gain the ability to declare types, they tend to start off with quite simple type systems, as it's easy to "just go dynamic"; they're initially happy to put in a bit of typing to speed up inner loops of numerical code and to tighten up error checking on interfaces. While languages without easy access to an Anything type rely on having a type system that can express lots of things, because it's a real pain when they have to escape it. But if they meet in the middle, the tradeoff will, instead, be one of a more complete type system that lets you check for more at compile time and gain more efficient code generation - versus the mental burden of understanding it.

I suspect that Haskell is, perhaps, a bit too far in the "complex" direction, while the support for parametric containers in Chicken Scheme is weak (why can't I define my own complex type if I create a "set" or "dict" container implementation, for example?) - we'll meet somewhere in the middle!

[Edited: Clarified the initial paragraphs a bit]

Of Biopsies and Dreams and 5 Dimensional Poetry (by sarah)

Today I went to the Drs for my biopsies and de/re-coiling and a chat but unfortunatly the chat took up too much of the time - what with the fact I've had a biopsy that showed polyps not being in their records for me etc... But I am actually feeling alot happier about the whole thing after the chat - I've signed the consent forms and have another appointment when it will all happen and have the good news that the swabs were all negative drastically reducing the chances of nasty things like pelvic infections.

I had to go in with out Alaric as the baby was being full of beans and as always I found it difficult to get the words out to the Dr. It's like my brain goes - ARG! A doctor!

I'm going to have another coil put back in as it is pretty much the only option open to me to thin the womb lining down and having looked at family history it seems the best course of action. Unless something happens like perforiation or the biopsies show something nasty up all this should not have an impact on my fertility. But due to the thickness I am looking at a good long stint of bleeding once the coil is put in (hopefully in the right place this time). So I maybe going onto the pill aswell initially to reduce just how much it will bleed.

The coil is going in specifically to thin the womb lining - I hope it works but I have to wait a month for this next bit due to the over capacity nature of the Drs Surgery.

So that is that and then there is my dream!

Last night I had a dream in which I had made this poetry book out of fabric and lace and different textures. It was a textiles visual poem but more than that - it had my written poetry in and the words actually spoke, the words were woven in and around the substance of the book and the substance of the book told it's own story as did the type and placement of the letters - it was a bueatiful thing.

And then David Tennant (spiky haired Dr Who) appeared and he looked at this textile book and was in love with it and the power of my words and he wanted me to write Dr Who episodes with Neil Giamon. He was convinced that anyone who could produce such a book as that would write amazing Dr Who episodes. In my dream I was embarrased and was trying to explain that I had once been asked to try and write an episode before the new lot started but that I didn't as I thought I had to take into account the film that shall not be named! (This bit actually happened to me whilst I was at Uni but mainly as I was on the right mailing list at the right time).

As I was trying to explain assasins from the future appeared to destroy the book and maybe kill me - I had been encoding the concousness of the universe in the patterns within the book and other pieces of my work - that is why they had such awe and power.

Just as it looked like it was curtains for me Alaric (hubby) appeared and turned out to be an actual Dr Who and defeated the assassins with the gadgets within his coat of many pockets (those of you who know us will be laughing at this bit!).

This was a great dream and I was sad to be rudely awoken from it by Alaric asking where the school uniform for Jeany was this morning.

Now last night I went to sleep mulling over the story line/arch for the series I am currently working on - I plan to write the middle book for NaNoWriMo and I have gotten a long way into the first book of this trilogy. This would sort of explain the book being a code but more than that - I have actually been trying to work out how to make a piece of textile visual poetry since seeing the little knitted bits at the Cheltenham Lit Fest. Also last night just before I went to bed I was noodling around on this blog. Add in the Placebo music and the dream makes a bit more sense.

From this dream I now have a much better idea of what I want to make with regards to my poetry and textiles. And that is 5D textile and wearable electronics highbred of visual, audio and the written word. It is not 4D as though there is a sense of narrative there is no one correct direction of flow. The whole thing can fed back into itself and go round in loops, jump over several pages and so forth. I may have it as a ball book rather than a standard bound tome. It is forming in my mind and it is beuatiful and complex.