Avaragado's blog

programming-sudoku.jpg
Originally uploaded by avaragado.

And Seesaw said unto Nebuknuth, “How shall we know of the apocalypse? Whence cometh the sign foretelling the End Times?”

And Nebuknuth replied, “Dunno, mate, but books about programming Sudoku would seem a pretty good bet.”

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Originally uploaded by avaragado.

“The Abolition of Slavery at Waterstone’s, Cambridge”

I guess they now pay minimum wage.

One afternoon last week I sat in the sunshine for an hour sizzling gently; no such luck during the bank holiday weekend just gone, although it was supposedly above average for the time of year. (Does the average include measurements from the ice age? I have no idea. I sometimes imagine that there’s a man with a moustache in a basement – er, a man in a basement with a moustache – er, a moustachioed man in a clean-shaven basement – who daily adds a new row of temperature readings to a stupidly large spreadsheet and distributes updated averages to Her Majesty’s Dominions, where urchins in flat caps scurry between miserable grey concrete carbuncles retying calculation-aiding knots in civil servants’ beards, enabling localised variants of Michael Fish to tell us that it’s a bit parky for the time of year. I also sometimes imagine that I imagine too much.)

This bank holiday weekend brought a trip to London. The magic combination of ‘weekend’ and ‘bank holiday’ ensured that the Cambridge/King’s Cross train transmogrified into a bus near Stevenage and the Northern Line (Bank branch) was running a restricted service (no trains at all). So, since I was seeing a friend in Walthamstow (which sounds like a euphemism but isn’t), I trained to Tottenham Hale instead and tubed to Walthamstow Central for about 1.45. I’m far too embarrassed to mention the off-by-one error I made when touching in my Oyster (another non-euphemism); look, I’m left-handed, OK?

Adam, my chum, met me at the station. We had a cup of tea in an olde Englishe coffee shop (paninis, overpriced modern art for sale and traditional East European immigrant staff) and then wandered through Walthamstow market (“Pahnd a bowl! Evryfin a pahnd!”) and a generic shopping centre (Grafton + hijab). Adam was busy packing to move across Walthamstow (not a euphemism) so I was soon bundled back on the tube to Kentish Town via Euston (not a euphemism), the venue for the main event of the weekend: Chef’s flat-warming.

Chef has bought a compact ground-floor apartment in an estate a few minutes from the tube. The previous owners were apparently two gentlemen intimately familiar with the insides of an Ikea showroom (euphemism). To give it that homely feel Chef has hung an LCD TV on the wall (he doesn’t know much about art but he knows what he likes).

Chef and I were soon joined by Chris, Melanie and Louise (who drove down) and Andy (who trained it a few hours behind me). We absorbed as many of the sun’s feeble bank holiday rays as we could before adjourning to the living room where Chef and Chris provided a Director’s Half-Cut commentary to this week’s Doctor Who episode. Then Cormac, Steph and Keith arrived and the evening dissolved into games, pizzas, alcohol and series two of Extras. (Chris’s photos.)

I think we climbed into assorted sleeping bags at about 3.30, scattered across various rooms. Approximately five hours later Chef rose a toute vitesse and found the bathroom occupied, so he opened the front door and performed a traditional Bulimian opera on his doorstep instead. In several movements.

Chris, Melanie and Louise went home shortly afterwards, once Chef had washed away his vomitary moat and they could leave without performing the long jump. I went back to sleep; I suspect they were home before I woke up again.

Andy and I left at about 10.30. The journey home was smooth until Seven Sisters, when the driver announced that all services between Cambridge and Tottenham Hale were going to Seven Sisters instead, for a laugh probably. Sadly the announcement was a bit garbled and was made about a second before the doors shut, leaving us no time to comprehend it and escape. At Tottenham Hale the truth emerged, we reversed our journey, waited an age for the next tube back to Seven Sisters, and then stood on the platform there for half an hour waiting for the next Cambridge train.

While we were waiting a gabble of about thirty schoolgirls turned up; the dawn chorus but with added ringtones. They flocked around the platform then perched on the next train, which was for Hertford West. A few minutes after peace had once more descended some stragglers turned up; we could tell they were supposed to be with the schoolgirl party as they yah-ok’d in a similar patois and, well, we’d earwigged on a phone conversation a bit earlier when they’d said they were lost. Platform 2, they’d been told, and so here they were. They asked a fellow traveller when “the next train to Liverpool” was. After checking that they meant Liverpool Street and not yer actual Liverpool, they were directed to Platform 1. Turns out that all those schoolgirls were now heading in entirely the wrong direction.

I laughed in vicious, cynical amusement and ranted at Andy about kids today, not one brain cell between them all, etc. Then I remembered that Andy once took the wrong half of the King’s Cross/King’s Lynn splitter train and ended up deep in the fens while actually trying to get to Liverpool. I felt vaguely guilty for a moment and then decided it made it even funnier.

The Cambridge train we eventually boarded was full, so we stood for an hour as various Danes, who appeared to make up most of the carriage, clogged the aisles, drank beer and skåld each other (not a euphemism).

The Rome video, just squeezing into three rather alcoholic parts, is now available on my YouTube channel.

• Rome 2005 (playlist):
  • Tour,Trevi fountain, Spanish Steps + alcohol, Trajan’s column and market, alcohol, Coliseum, alcohol, Forum, alcohol, Pantheon, alcohol
  • Piazza Navona, Monument to Victor Emmanuel II aka the Typewriter, alcohol, Vatican, alcohol, Domus Aurea aka Nero’s Golden Palace
  • Alcohol, Vatican Museum, alcohol, photos

You’ll be pleased to learn that this torture now ceases until I get round to editing this year’s skiing video.

Now on my YouTube channel:

• Malta 2003 (playlist):
  • Arrival, our apartments, the beach, Tarxien neolithic temple, driving about
  • The Blue Grotto, meeting Bob and Karen, Hagar Qim neolithic temple, Gozo ferry, driving
  • St John’s co-cathedral, the aquarium
  • Driving, Andy and Lisa’s wedding, our last night, photos
• Agde 2004 (playlist):
  • Tour, drunk, the town, drunk
  • Carcassonne, Montpellier, drunk
  • La Grotte des Demoiselles, The Oppidum of Enserune, drunk
  • Nimes, Pont du Gard, photos

Never available before on t’Internet! Coming soon: Rome!

* Offer closes yesterday

Vidayos.

Bonus points for getting the reference.

Anyway, everything on Avaragado Pictures is now available on my thoroughly exciting YouTube channel. Sound and vision may even be synchronised. I’ll probably retire the page on my web site shortly.

Soon I’ll start to add more stuff to YouTube: the longer movies that I didn’t bother to add to my web site. These include, and are limited to, Malta 2003, Agde 2004 and Rome 2005. (Oh, hang on, I might put Courchevel 2002 up as well. I don’t think Alpe D’Huez 2001 is worth doing as it’s way too long.)

And I realise I still need to produce Les Arcs 2007. I crave forgiveness and dry roasted peanuts, not necessarily in that order.

Yesterday’s YouTube excitement meant I was unable to bring you my scheduled blog entry, on the anniversary of the Speccy.

I was at the show where the Spectrum was launched: the Computer Fair at Earl’s Court. I went on the second day, which I think is 25 years ago yesterday, with my chum Mr Golds and my Dad. Young Mr Golds (note: not Jewish (family joke)) was at that time waiting for his BBC Micro to be delivered; he’d ordered it a few months before.

The Sinclair stand was, predictably, packed (here’s a review, including stand photo, from Sinclair User, June 82). A large panel showed the Spectrum in all its glory. TVs showed real, live software – I remember watching it draw the Sinclair logo and the Speccy’s rainbow flash. I don’t believe you could actually touch one, since I think they only had wooden dummy models at the launch.

A Negotiation took place, as I recall. The result was my Dad lending me the money to order a 16K Spectrum there and then. There was a wait, as many others were doing the same thing. (I did pay my Dad back.)

My order slip was number 1151 I think. I still have it somewhere.

I took home one (or two) of the fold-out advertising brochures, showing a full-size Spectrum on one side and full of clearly mocked-up screenshots and oodles of technical specs for me to memorise (JPEGs at the bottom of this page). I kept it in my school bag for months. Yes, I’ve still got at least one copy of that brochure (it fell out of every computer magazine for months).

Naturally my Spectrum wasn’t delivered within the specified 28 days. I think it arrived at the end of June. A plain brown cardboard box.

Already cynical, I didn’t believe it was going to actually work. But it did! I set it up in the living room, plugging it into the big family telly for a couple of hours, at least.

Ordered so early, it was what later came to be called an Issue 1 machine – one of the first 60,000 or so to be manufactured. Light grey keys, none of yer latecomer blue-grey nonsense. Serial number 0000036.

Spectrum number 36. It staggered me then, and staggers me even more now.

At some point I upgraded to 48K, which for an issue 1 machine meant opening up the case and plugging in a daughterboard. And of course I got the Interface 1 and Microdrive when they were eventually released. While I was waiting for those to appear (28 days? Bah!) I managed to break the Speccy by stupidly messing about with the edge connector. I got it fixed, but I don’t remember now whether they fixed it simply by replacing the entire motherboard, which happened quite a lot, or by actually fixing the problem. If they replaced the motherboard then I’m just left with Spectrum number 100,000+ in case number 36, which isn’t quite so exciting. I could fetch it out of storage and take a look, I guess. (Yes, it’s in its original box.)

Breaking the Speccy more or less coincided with moving house and starting at a new school. On my second day there, one of the teachers got wind of my predicament – by then I’d got the Interface 1 and Microdrive but had no working computer – and lent me one of the school’s for the weekend. Mr Machin, that was. Great bloke. (That’s not the teacher in the “backup software” business who I mentioned last year.)

And here I am, 25 years later, still going on about it all. I even edited the Wikipedia ZX Spectrum entry a few nights ago. Only to mention the light grey keys, though; I didn’t think they’d be interested in Mr Machin.