The Ringtail

Just over a week ago my wife and I were in Oxford. Full of the joys of the New Year we parked at the Park and Ride to walk in to town. We were just coming up to the huge roundabout at the top of Banbury Road when we heard a miaowing from the verge. We noticed a tiny kitten was in the verge, and was about to make a break for it across the road. Another couple had stopped but we offered to stay and call the RSPCA to sort things out.

My wife managed to get hold of the kitten and pull him out. A shocking site. He had horrific build up of gunk round his eyes that had left him blind, was covered in ticks, and was so underweight you could barely feel him. We phoned the RSPCA who asked us to take him to the local vets where we were told his chance of survival was less than 50%. The vet had never seen so many ticks on a cat before, and thought that the eye discharge was likely to be a horrible case of cat flu. Coupled with the diarrhoea and weight loss, she was not hopeful that he would pull through.

I’m pleased to say that I collected him from the vets this morning, and he has made a full and complete recovery. He’s full of life, playful and making up for lack of food by piling on the weight he had lost. It’s unbearable to think that anyone could have dumped such a tiny animal at the side of the road, but the vet couldn’t see how else he got where he was. Still, he’s safe now, and we look forward to welcoming Virgil into our house as our new pet – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

When I was at primary school we had two books in the library that I remember vividly. One was stories of giants (which I mainly remember because my daughter also had it at school and we read it together), and one which was stories of dragons. The dragon book was great. It was quite dense text, really nice ink drawings, and was written in such a way that you couldn’t quite tell if it was true or not. Each story was about a dragon who lived in a particular part of the country, so it was almost like a regional guide to the dragons of England. I loved it. Troll Hunter feels to me, as an adult, how that book made me feel when I was a kid. I don’t think I really believed that a dragon actually lived under a hill just outside London, and I’m pretty sure that trolls don’t really exist in Norway. If they did, though, this is exactly what they would be like.

The graphics are stunning in that they aren’t really noticeable. As far as I was concerned I was watching raw footage – here actually be dragons. In one of the extras the director talks about getting the right place for the trolls to live, and then shooting in those actual locations, ‘because people in Norway would know if it was wrong’. This authenticity and commitment is readily apparent in watching the film and means that a 100-foot tall troll smashing around the mountains really doesn’t look out of place at all.

A lot of films in this style theorise and introspect endlessly about themselves – Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, et al. “Look at us we’re making a film about making a film, and the dialogue is all really self-aware because we’re in a film – do you see?” This doesn’t do that at all, it’s just very natural, well-paced and real. This may well be a function of being a Norwegian film rather than a product of America; whatever it is it works well. As I was writing this review I realised that I’ve been thinking about this film as a documentary – not a film about making a documentary, but an actual documentary. I originally started this paragraph, ‘The crew are really good on camera as well’ – probably the best praise I can give really!

I’d highly recommend this film, even if the idea of a film about trolls feels a bit too nerdy. It’s really about people and place and is real and human without trying too hard, or being overly self-aware. Watch it before they screw everything up and do the US remake.

I travel on the train a couple of times a week, and I always work on my laptop on the journey. I don’t like sitting around doing nothing at the best of times, and a couple of hours on the train is a big chunk of coding work/hacking that I can get done. I use a Mac these days (separate post), but as an ex-linux user I always look over people’s shoulders to see what OS they use and what they are doing.

There is a very poorly researched and statistically invalid pattern that I’ve noticed on what these different users _do_ on their laptops:

Mac users – tend to be doing something creative or consuming entertainment: making something or watching movies. More watchers than creaters, but quite a bit of garageband tweaking.

Windows users tend to be consuming work: reading email, looking at presentations, looking at spreadsheets.

Linux users (of which I have seen 2) use emacs. Not a large study group but that’s what both of them were doing.

Conclusions? Well, I’d guess that the real answer is that Mac users are using their own machines and therefore working on personal projects (or able to watch movies), and Windows users are using a work machine and are therefore consuming more work. And maybe the Mac users are just killing time until they can get back to email, secretly envying the Windows users who can get a 3G dongle to work…

Am making some changes to my web presence for the new year, and courtesy of the folks at SWBroadband. Keep tuned.

While I’m in a blog editor – tasksapp has now registered users in double figures! I’m still waiting for feedback to come in for the most part (although thanks to a couple of folks who’ve already given me some ideas), but it’s exciting that people are interested enough to ask for a log-in at this stage. The interesting thing I’ve found is that most of the suggestions made so far are ones that I will definitely implement, but that I don’t think I’d ever have thought of. It’s interesting how different my perception of the software is from other people, and I’m sure there will be lots more changes to make as I’m exposed to new and better ways of approaching how it works.