pedanther

The new fitness tracker is going well. The "time to get up and stretch" notifications are better targeted at my use case than the Fitbit's method was, and are still working effectively.

It took several attempts to get the new fitness tracker to track my bicycle rides. On the first attempt, it didn't track anything; apparently there was some permission or other that hadn't been set correctly. On the second attempt (after I'd confirmed that all the permissions were now set properly), I decided not to hit the "starting cycling" button and see if the automatic exercise detection figured out what I was doing; not only did it not detect that I was cycling, at the end of the hour-long ride I got a notification that I'd been sitting in one place for an hour and should get up and do some exercise...

Since then, I've been hitting the "starting cycling" button every time, to be on the safe side.

It's been a bit tricky lately finding places to ride the bike that are off the road: we have a fairly good network of bike trails around the town, but in January a lot of the trails in my vicinity were torn up as the first stage of laying down fresh tarmac, and it was only recently that the actual laying down began. Looking forward to having that finished; the new tracks, in the areas they've been completed, are smooth and very nice to ride on.


At Parkrun this week (where the fitness tracker had no trouble automatically detecting that I was doing walking exercise), I saw a small brown lizard sunning itself by the side of the track.


It's been a rough week at work, featuring one of Those Clients.


At board game club, we played Last Light, a game involving exploring the galaxy and gathering resources. In general outline, it's somewhat similar to Eclipse, which we played a while back, but with some significant differences in gameplay (including a less complicated scoring system) that result in it being less of a marathon. One of the interesting gameplay differences that's not directly related to the playing time is that the board representing the galaxy rotates at intervals, with different parts of it rotating at different speeds, altering the strategic situation each time it happens.


Went to the cinema to see The Return, a demythified retelling of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after decades away, starring Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus and Juliette Binoche as Penelope. It's getting good notices for the central performances, which I agree are spectacular, but I think the story as a whole has some shortcomings and I'm not sure the ending would have worked if the performances weren't so good. (It probably doesn't help that it's not that long since I read The Last Song of Penelope, another demythified retelling of Odysseus' return which I found more effective.) I did enjoy some of the nods to other parts of the Odyssey that are woven into the story.


This week was the release of The Beekeeper's Picnic, a new point-and-click adventure game featuring an elderly beekeeper named Sherlock Holmes who used to be a famous detective but is now very definitely retired but keeps tripping over mysteries needing to be solved anyway. I'm enjoying it so far.


On the library trip where I picked up The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I also discovered that the library had a copy of Tove Jansson's first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, so I've now read that and am partway through the sequel, Comet in Moominland. (Neither of them count for the book chain "no people" challenge because I take it as read that Moomins count as people.) I'm not disliking them, but I suspect I've left it too long to start the series and have missed the age where they would have clicked with me.


I need to have a proper think about how I'm using 750 Words as a journaling tool. The journaling itself feels helpful, and I want to continue doing it, but I'm not sure 750 Words is actually the right place for it; I'm not really using it the way it's supposed to be used. For one thing, you're supposed to pick a consistent time of day to do it, and to start and finish in a single sitting, but I've been all over the shop lately (the best time of day is clearly first thing in the morning, but that's also the best time of day for several other things so it often gets bumped) and have frequently written a journal entry in two or more sittings when I've been able to find the time. (None of those has resulted in me failing the challenge of writing 750 words without interruption, because each journal entry is easily over a thousand words - which in itself is another reason why this might not be the appropriate application.)

. The season recently closed for the club's latest production, The Regina Monologues, a set of six interconnected stories inspired by the six wives of Henry VIII but set in the present day. I wasn't involved (it's an all-female cast, with only the six women appearing on stage), but I went to see a performance and was very impressed. It's the most challenging (for both the cast and the audience) bit of drama the club has done in the last few years.

The club's next production is Seussical, the musical inspired by the works of Dr Seuss, which I'm also not in; I decided not to audition for several reasons, including still being a bit musicalled out after Mamma Mia. My sister was disappointed when I told her; she says I have the right kind of face to be a Dr Seuss character.


. Am still listening to Re: Dracula. One problem I've been occasionally having is that because it's intended to be listened to on a specific schedule, I sometimes find that the schedule expects me to listen to an episode when I'm still busy digesting something else. That was an issue the day I read the last of the Penelope trilogy, and I couldn't easily put the episode off because there was another one due the next day; it cropped up again the night I went to see The Regina Monologues, but on that occasion there was a break of several days before the next episode, so that time I postponed the episode until I felt ready for it.


. A while ago, I started using the Calibre ebook management software to organise my ebooks. Part of the motivation is that I've replaced my physical ebook reader a couple of times now, and each time I did, the books that I bought through the official store had their read status and tags automatically re-applied from the cloud, but not the several hundred books I'd obtained by other means. The second time I was faced with the prospect of going through all those books, individually re-marking the ones I'd already read (if I could remember) and re-adding all the tags (if I could remember, with part of the problem being that the tags largely existed to remind me of things), I added Calibre to the mix, in the hope that once this round of re-marking and re-tagging was complete Calibre would remember the details for me and handle the whole task should it ever again be required.

I've achieved a full success with the tags; if I add a tag to a book on the reader, it automatically gets copied to Calibre's records next time they share information, and if I add a tag to a book in Calibre, it's automatically copied to the reader. The read status has proven to be trickier. With the help of a plugin, I've got it set up so that the ebook reader tells Calibre whenever I change the status of a book on the reader (how far I'm up to, or if I've marked it as finished); what I haven't been able to find is a way to arbitrarily mark a book as finished in Calibre and have that recognised by the ebook reader. I suppose if all else fails I can go through everything on the ebook reader and mark the ones I've read there, and that information will be transferred to Calibre, and then hopefully since it's information provided by the ebook reader it will, when the time comes, be transferred back.


. At the boardgame club this week, I had a chance to get a couple of games on the table that I haven't had out for a while. I got Jabberwocky and The Lady and the Tiger in a Kickstarter; neither is a single game, but instead each has a set of components (cards and coloured tokens) and a rulebook containing rules for several different games that can be played with the components, depending on how many players you have. They seemed like a useful and flexible thing to be able to take along to a boardgame gathering, but in practice I've only ever played a couple of games out of each and still don't really know most of the games well enough to be confident suggesting them.

My favourite game from either set is "Labyrinth", a two-player game in The Lady and the Tiger where the cards are laid out to create a playing board that changes configuration each turn and the players race to get all their pieces from one corner of the board to the other across the shifting terrain; I got to play a game of it this week while we were waiting for more people to show up so we could start a larger game.

When one other person showed up, we also played a three-player game from Jabberwocky; in "Gyre", which I don't think I've played before, the cards are laid out to create a playing board which the players move around the edge of while performing actions to gain control of specific areas on the board. It took us a round or two to come to grips with how the game worked, but it ended up being a very close match and we all enjoyed it.

(I promise the games don't all start with the cards being laid out to create a playing board; last time I had Jabberwocky on the table, for instance, we played "Slithy", which involves using the tokens to bid for points based on the predicted value of another player's hand of cards.)


. One of my so-far-unrealised plans for long service leave was to take up knitting or crocheting or something of the sort, partly for the potential practical value and partly to have something to do with my hands while I'm watching TV or listening to a podcast. Since I have so far consistently forgotten to go and obtain the necessary equipment and materials, I decided this week to shift my sights to something a bit less ambitious, and for which I already have the necessary equipment to hand: namely, learning to shuffle a deck of cards properly. My current shuffling technique is not the worst I've observed among the people I've played with, but it's awkward and clumsy enough that I'd like to improve it, and I've always been impressed by anyone who could do a clean riffle shuffle. I haven't made much progress on that specific goal so far, as none of the "How to do a riffle shuffle" tutorials I've looked at bother to explain how the actual riffling part works, having apparently been written by people who have been handling cards long enough to have forgotten which of the things that are now second nature to them might be opaque to a beginner. So for now I'm sticking with a tutorial that covers the very basics of card handling, like what a "dealer's grip" is (another thing that came up in a shuffling tutorial without further elaboration), and hoping to work my way up. I can do a pretty consistent one-handed swing cut now, at least, so that's something.

. My login to borrow ebooks from the library had stopped working for no apparent reason, which happens several times a year and almost always just means that it's been a while since I borrowed a book in person and the library computer wants me to go in and confirm that I'm still a local resident and active library user. (I had to figure that out from first principles the first time it happened; I don't know why they can't display a message explaining what's going on. Well, probably because the ebook library is a third-party system and it would be some flavour of Too Hard.) Accordingly, I went in to the library to see if anything caught my eye that I could borrow and prove my continued existence. One of the first things that caught my eye, on the display of New and Popular Books near the front desk, was the third volume of Claire North's recent trilogy about what Odysseus' wife Penelope had to deal with while he was off having the Odyssey, which I'd heard about somewhere a while ago and thought might be interesting. While I was browsing through the shelves I found that the library had the first two volumes as well, so I decided to borrow the first one, Ithaca, and see how it went.

. Last year, I started listening to Re: Dracula, the audio drama version of Dracula Daily, but gave up on it a little way into September for a number of reasons, including general Having Too Much to Keep Up With and a more specific Fed Up With All the Ads. I decided that this year, having a bit more mental and emotional bandwidth to spare, I'd pick up where I left off (or actually, a few episodes before, to start at a suitable inflection point in the narrative), and so far it's going pretty well. There are still All the Ads, but I'm coping with them better (and being more ruthless about just skipping through them, since at this point even if there was an ad for something I was actually interested in I would probably avoid it out of spite).

. I've been doing a project for a while now, posting on Tumblr, where I go through The Count of Monte Cristo chapter by chapter and note everything the text says about when the events take place. The hope was at the end of it I would have a set of information I could assemble into a proper timeline that would be useful for future reference, but I am confounded at every turn. And, mark you, it's not that Dumas doesn't give dates, it's that he seems incapable of giving a date without contradicting himself: the most important event in the novel is given no fewer than three different dates in different chapters (and, on one occasion, two different dates within the same scene); the only character who has a birth date explicitly stated has two different explictly-stated birth dates; the date that a week-long event begins is two days after the date that it ends. I still want to present my findings in some kind of useful reference document, but at this point I don't have any idea what form such a thing would take.

. My current standby book, for when I need a couple of pages to keep my reading streak going but don't feel up to anything too involving, is Try Whistling This, a collection of essays about music by the composer and music critic (and host of Radio National's The Music Show) Andrew Ford. One of the essays I've read so far was about the role of nostalgia in popular music, and how musicians who were considered rebellious and dangerous in their heyday, like Elvis and Beethoven, wind up being sold as nice and comforting. (Which reminded me of the time I heard a choir sing "Imagine" at a memorial service, in between a hymn and the Lord's Prayer, and found myself reflecting that it's become so familiar that it's now possible for the words to pass through people without slowing down.)

. Too tired to elaborate, but Natural Six is really very good.