The Last Smile of the Girl on the Platform

Dear Readers, the Archdruid has allowed me just one posting on this subject - inspired by a stray visitor to this site. And after reading the site I am about to link to, I need say no more about it.

The writer of the piece covers much of the ground we have dealt with in our own journey on this blog - but he also identifies the station and both the trains in the sequence. I repent in dust and ashes of my lack of train knowledge, and only wish I was like the author of this blog.

However I would note that a more appropriate location for the young woman to be travelling would be Syston near Leicester. It is closer to Sutton (although still 100 miles or so away) but is truly the "home of pies". Pukka Pies are made there and it is also in the Appellation Controlee-type region within which Melton Mowbray pork pies can be made.

Girl on the Brighton Platform Smile

I picked up today on Sipech's response to the Archdruid's rant about the "Girl on the platform smile" advert.

Sipech, who blogs at "the Alethiophile", remarks that the station appears to be in Sussex. And after paying very careful attention to the advert, I believe he is right. You will notice that at one stage the man with the ukulele is standing in front of a destination board that clearly contains the letters "IGHTON" - which I would take to be short for "Brighton".

But this gives me pause to think - because the list of stations that the young man hazards for the young woman's destination are all in the North. It is unlikely that anyone would have a choice of Hull and Wigan from the same station even in the North - they laying at nearly opposite ends of the trans-Pennine route - unless indeed they were in Liverpool. But the chances of guessing she is going to one of these stations when she is sitting in a small station south of London are remote indeed.

And this afternoon, being in a similar romantic predicament to the man with the beard, I tried serenading a young lady from the opposite platform at Bletchley station with a ukulele. She did cross the platform, but then started hitting me with the ukulele and telling me to stop singing.

So I have come to a reluctant conclusion. Playing the ukulele at railway stations does not make you successful in love, and the people in that advertisement were not in the place they were pretending to be. I strongly suspect they may be actors. It would appear you can't trust anybody these days.

I have tried on-line dating agencies in an attempt to find a second wife myself - my first wife threw me out for "being boring". But when I enter my hobbies - train-spotting, Java programming, cycling and real-ale - into most websites I get a 404 error. I try not to take it personally.

Pastafarian Away

I was relieved when I saw the man who has won the right to having his picture on his Austrian driver's licence with a straining bowl on his head. Niko Alm wants to assert his right to wear his own religious headgear on his licence, as a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But I was worried that, when I saw a picture of him, he might turn out to be some kind of starey-eyed loser who's just doing this to win nerd-points from his nerd mates.

Thank goodness that wasn't true.

Four-tiered anthropology

Dear Readers, I've had something of a revelation. It's of great personal significance and, given I've never had anyone explain it like this to me before - perhaps it is of worldwide import.

Maybe you, like me, have always considered the human person in terms of a 4-tiered architecture. The body is the equivalent of the hardware and OS in a computer system. The memories and the deepest thoughts - the database. The personality would equate to the logic or, if you will, business rules layer. And the way we act with respect to the outside world equates to the presentation layer - whether that is the mere CSS of a set of clothes and a haircut, or the rendering of html and javascript to define the actual way we behave.

Now, to me, the most important layer was the Database layer. That, I believed, was where the true Burton resided. Tucked away from the world, containing neither redundant data nor duplicating keys - that is how I truly am. The behaviours I wrapped round my personality were just the presentation layer - to be changed at will, always provided the data forms I needed to process or display were already designed into the database. I know that some think of me as merely a bland and boring finance systems auditor. But to me, being the master of the spreadsheet was merely my outward display to the world, to be re-skinned as soon as I found a better visual designer.

But I have begun to doubt. I can't help but think that if the presentation layer defines how I react to and treat other people, and is my only interface to the real world - whatever that means - then is my entire personality stack upside down? Have I prized the pristine nature of my inmost thoughts and neglected my W3C accessibility and webservice error handling? When people think that I have something wrong with me - is it possible that it's not just because they handle the Javascript badly? Maybe - in short - the way that I am rendered is more important than the way I am stored?

It is, I am sure you will agree, a disturbing thought. But I exempt my interactions with the Archdruid from these ponderings. Whatever my own problems may be, that's one personality that's still running IE6.

Not just a Redshirt

Archdruid, this has to stop!!

http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/exclusives/9722/

I'm really putting my foot down this time. Ever since yesterday's Star Trek service, the Archdruid has been referring to the lower-ranking Beaker People (and I include myself in this - or, rather, I don't but the Archdruid does) as "Redshirts". The implication being that she thinks we're expendable and unimportant - stock characters with no significance except to be used to move the plot forward.

And thinking about it, I realised that many of us are treated in such a way all the time. We are reduced to shallow, one-dimensional characters, identifiable by at most a couple of traits. So this blog is "cut" in such a way as to suggest that Marston Moretaine is dim and incompetent. Drayton Parslow is dim and power-mad. Young Keith is dim and yet surprisingly technically competent. And I - I, dear readers, I am portrayed as a boring accountant.

Archdruid - we are not "redshirts". Or, though we may be to you - we are not to ourselves. We are the centres of our own universes - we do not merely orbit yours. In your imagination, we may have red shirts on, existing solely to further your objectives - we are simply obstacles to be overcome, or cannon-fodder to be pushed into your schemes and consumed. Or we are just to be disregarded. But in our world we have goldy-coloured shirts. It is you who drift on the edges of our universe - one day you will wander off out of our orbit, like the red shirt you are, and no longer matter. Just another redshirt wandered off into an unknown and unimportant destiny.

I, for example - you may think I am just an accountant - one who is interested solely in train-spotting, cycling and beer drinking. But you misread me. For am I not also an experience Java Developer? You see the additional horizons opening before me already. I am not so hot on CSS, I'll give you that - if you want colour and light and images on your website I'm not your man. But I can craft you a red-hot persistent Java object.
And you dismiss me as someone who cycles to train stations, watches some trains and then drinks a pint of warm beer before cycling back. Which, of course, I am. But there is so much more to me. I love trams, and steam rollers, and the film Shirley Valentine.

I must stop now. I realise I have probably not only gone too far in challenging Archdruid Eileen, but also given her a certain amount of material to use. But Eileen, before I hear the swish of the Slazenger of Doom, remember - there would be far less sadness in the world if we all remembered that everyone wears a gold shirt in their own lives.

The Methodist Covenant Prayer in Venn Diagrams

Dear Readers, as you know we have been celebrating the Venn Family, whose commemoration it is today in the Church of England, through the medium of Venn Diagrams.

And in the midst of arranging Beaker People into various sets and sub-sets, groupings and so on we realised we had the chance to mark the Methodist Ordinations that are taking place this weekend. So it may be the wrong time of the year in one sense, but we are pleased to present - the Methodist Covenant Prayer in Venn Diagrams. Although it is better in the original.

Original inspiration shamelessly ripped off from Venn that Tune.

Burton lets Everybody Down

Dear Readers, it has been a bitter, bitter day. I have cried many sad salt tears into the dust. I would repent in dust and ashes were it not that my tears have made the dust all damp. I have let everybody down. That this should happen on this holiest of holy days - Thomas Hardy's birthday - is at one and the same time further tragedy, and yet strangely appropriate.

Drayton was no source of sympathy when I met him. He merely referred me to James chapter 3 and told me I should watch what I say. I knew this already. I should be more careful.

Yet it was the most innocent of unpremeditated remarks. I merely told Eileen that her sermon, on the theme of the last chapter of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, had one of her highest theological point densities in ages. She asked me what a theological point density was, and I explained that it is the frequency of valid and useful theological points in a sermon.

In fact, I told her, her theological point wait ratio was perhaps the shortest since her "Are we all a figment of Richard Dawkin's Imagination" sermon, at about one theological point per four minutes. While her theological word density was a little on the low side - probably because she was speaking quite quickly, due to her fear at being up in that cherry picker at the time.

How, she asked me, did I know how today's sermon compared with others from the past? And I realised I had said too much. By the time I returned to my room it looked like it had been burgled. And my Book of Sermon Recording had been found.

My fellow Sermon Statistic Recorders of the nation, I have let the cat out of the bag. For so many centuries we have kept the existence of our Guild a secret. We have hidden from the preachers, that source of the food on which we eat - the raw statistics of sermons. They have been unaware that every congregation contains a man - for it is normally a man - who keeps at home a Book of Records of Sermons, in which we have kept the details of every talk given. We have passed the secrets of our guild, as strong as sealing wax and as deep as the sea, from all preachers. And now I have let a church leader know.

For the rest of you, I may as well explain. A Book of Sermon Recording does not contain the sermon itself - where is the interest in that? Instead it contains the facts around the length of the sermon, the number of theological points, the average time that you have to wait for a valid theological point and the strike rate, as described above. Eileen snatched my current book, but she missed my earlier version - and I am glad, now secrecy is pointless, to share the first few entries with you.

Fellow members of the Guild of Sermon Recorders, our life in the shadows is over. Our cover is blown. Our  time is at an end. We must pass to the Gray Havens, where we will spend our time evaluating Gross Domestic Product figures and comparing London Black Cab registration plates. I have let everybody down.

Or, of course, you could all just lay low - and pretend I've made all this up?

Lies, Damned Lies and Decimal Places

There was a certain amount of noise in some parts of the Twittersphere yesterday, regarding the growth figures.
The growth figures last quarter indicated a 0.5% decrease in the economy. While for this, the growth figure was an increase of 0.5%. That meant it was back where it came from, said the pundits. Not so, said the twitterati. For if you subtract 0.5% and then add on 0.5%, that's not the same.

It's easy enough to show that this is true if you use a very large decline and increase. Suppose the economy is 100, and it declines by 50% in one quarter. The economy is now (100*(100-50)/100) = 50. But then if the economy grew by 50% in the next quarter, then it's now 50*(100+50)/100) = 75. So it's not where it came from, is it? QED.

But that's with a large increase. Let's do the same with a small decrease and then increase. So for 0.5% decline, the economy will go from 100 to 99.5. And with the same increase, it will then go from 99.5 to 99.5*(100+0.5)/100. Which is 99.9975. Which is clearly not 100.0000. But it's a bit of a mouthful. So let's round it to 2 Decimal Places, shall we? Which makes it... Oh. 100.00. So it's not the same number, but yet it is. So you could say the economy has bounced back to not quite where it was, but it is, probably, within the margin of error, once you remember that Bernie did build that extension after all, and Waitrose sold 4 more jars of mustard than they expected.

So on a strict, strict, strict interpretation, with every number quoted to 4 decimal places, the pedants may well be right. But even if they are, who wants to be a pedant?

One for all you geeks out there

I'm glad to say I think we've got Norville sorted out now. Mind you, we had to put in an all-nighter before the moon reached first-quarter.

One of the problems with being a lunar-based group is that we tend to attract lycanthropes, and it can be a real problem dealing with them. Norville being a fairly typical case. He was originally a warehouseman  in Marston Gate, but found all those night shifts affected his metabolism, and he turned into a werewolf. Must have been quite nerve-wracking for his colleagues, working in a plumbing warehouse in the middle of the night and wondering where the howling was coming from.

We originally thought we'd managed to re-balance him by an intensive course of the music of Bob Seger^*. But as a result he lost the desire to work in warehouses. Fortunately he got himself a new job - as Bjorn in an Abba tribute band. But he had always been a poor speller, and referred to himself as "Beorn". So it was no wonder he regressed again, and it was so embarrassing him constantly turning into a bear during "Waterloo". Made it very hard to play the guitar, as well, those great paws of his.

So this time we've assessed him properly and concluded that his problem was inefficient data storage. To rectify this we've eliminated duplicate data, created separate tables for each logical group of related data, identified each row with a unique key, and removed columns from each table that were not dependent on the primary key.

After all this hard work, we're ready to send him out again - this time as an insurance broker. We're fairly sure he'll be stable this time. After all, it's his third normal form.

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* Think about it...