Mark Carroll's Journal

Today is my first day of leave from work for over the Christmas break. This morning we sent the boys off back home to Asia to visit family, now it's just me and R. I am relaxing on the sofa with our dog L. while R. brings some sanity to the kitchen storage. I already feel my headspace increasing and have been getting some small postponed things done. Many more await.

I am quite good at sleeping. Given the opportunity, I can do plenty of it. This morning, I dreamt we lived somewhere else and I spied a sizable swirly unnatural-looking Weather Thing approaching, and turned to R. to strongly suggest that we leave the house now and drive elsewhere.

Again, I thought back to high school where one of my math teachers figured Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a regular dodecahedron and, looking at one, I wonder what the straightforward strategy is for doing that. I like to think that enough staring and turning would help make it clearer. Now, this is where I wish I had a large desktop system with lots of PCI-e slots for used RTX 3090's or somesuch: it's the kind of thing I'm happy to try idly chatting to some opensource LLM about. It's not as if anything's riding on the answer. Perhaps they're rather better at classic book suggestions than anything analytic though.

I also got to wonder about mobile telephony. ( How might routing work? )

My mention of idly chatting to LLMs reminds me, I have three sizable pending purchases in mind: such a desktop AI system, a small laptop for use while commuting, and a cross-trainer. The interesting question is how to prioritize them though clearly the first there should actually be last while I cross my fingers for the bubble bursting. Also, I'm reluctant to spend too freely until I'm more ahead of the higher-interest debt.

In the meantime, I've found that, as usual, BBC iPlayer didn't exactly help me discover that there's recent Later… with Jools Holland to provide me with a somewhat alternative musical backdrop, albeit a considerably mixed bag of such. I've been enjoying ex-BBC's Stereo Underground recently which is also nicely varied. Given that it often plays the music of my childhood, it makes me wonder: I think of all the energy of especially some of the more punk-ish songs, and how exciting life seemed to me at the time, especially with books filling my head with new intellectual worlds to wrestle with. There's something there I'd be interested to recapture, about possibility and choice, about who I am and what I pursue. I may not quite know which destinations make sense but one of the many wonderful things about R. is how supportive they are.

I'm now reading a pair of books that I am happy to continue with, though I'm still fairly early into both. Each offers me a bit of a view into a different time and culture.

I have Julia Lovell's abridgement and translation of the Chinese classic, Monkey King: Journey to the West. Excellently, it is small enough to fit into the lower-inside pocket of my coat which makes it ideal for bringing along with me, including on my commute. Just earlier today, I found myself wishing I'd brought it when I found myself facing an unexpectedly long queue in the post office. It's fun and I appreciate a touch of absurd satire.

I also picked up the previously mentioned Credo by Melvyn Bragg. It's a nice change for me to read material set in the Dark Ages and, so far, I find it interesting and engaging; it handles the religious side well. As a hardback, it's a rather weighty tome: I am happy to read it at home but it's certainly not routinely accompanying me on travels.

I've been working through Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, actually available from Glasgow libraries. Next, I thought I'd try a bit of Bujold, starting out the Vorkosigan saga with Shards of Honor or Cordelia's Honor seemed a good idea. No luck, though, neither Glasgow nor Edinburgh has either! Well, at least Edinburgh finally laid their hands on Melvyn Bragg's Credo so I'll give that a try, though I fear it might be a bit bulky for comfort in commuting.

I finally got around to watching the Japanese anime The Colors Within (2024). It's a gentle, sweet drama about teenagers finding each other.

I watch various rubbish so this is a low bar, and it's not the first movie I've liked that scores unremarkably on IMDb, but I'd say it's actually the best movie that I've seen for a while. It's not puzzling or challenging or anything, it's just nicely done and it made me happy.

Again, a small update with unconnected trivia:

Some while ago, I noted that I should read Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. (I never attach actual reasons to such notes.) I finally got around to starting it and found the story to increasingly match details of a series we had started recently on Netflix. R. helpfully reminded me that the latter's named … The Secret Agent. The plots don't match each other wholly; I have yet to learn how far they diverge.

Previously, I read Iain Banks' Raw Spirit, a book about travelling around Scotland trying different whiskies. I had not read it before, the subject matter not greatly appealing to me. Still, I am glad I did: it was generally entertaining, and mixed whisky notes with driving and car thoughts, also tellings of all manner of anecdotes. It is strange to get a sense of the author from his quite personal writing, and to have him travel so many now-familiar places, given that he passed away some time ago. Belatedly, I get to know a local whom I shall never meet.

Last weekend, R. and I went camping with our dog L. It was a rather hot weekend, which R. found draining. I was surprised not to have to wrap up very well overnight. On the first evening, I managed to slip on loose moss and face-plant onto a rock; I still sport a fine black eye. Also, my leg remains rather stiff, I suppose it will sort itself out in time.

My in-the-office days continue to be tiring. Annoyingly, I remain in a poor position to use the transit time well: I feel up to reading people's journals here, etc., and the free newspaper on the train home, but little more. I often feel fairly tired and just want to rest instead. Perhaps cooler weather will help, or I will get more used to the new routine. Until now, I hadn't had much of a commute since high school and my previous two jobs were wholly remote. In my last couple of years of school, I got into the habit of napping on the bus home.

( I grumble about Uber. )

A few of the songs seemed better when I heard them again in the final. Some of that was that the actual performances were improved over the semi-finals but I suspect that most of it was that I simply liked them more on a second hearing. Unfortunately, while some were agreeable enough, there weren't any songs that I feel a strong need to hear ever again.

After the song contest, it seems that I always comment on the difference between the jury vote and the popular vote. Each year brings interesting discrepancies between the two. I wonder if the UK's song selection process should, at least in part, return to including some kind of popular vote element. The current internal selection approach has proved poor at finding songs that win popular approval.

In experimenting with generative AI, I find Mistral quite nicely conversational, hence in part my recently writing here about the advent of AI companions. In chatting with it about books, it wondered if I'd read Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas and, by coincidence, I happen to have that very book out from the library.

My borrowing the novel at all is another coincidence: I had checked the library's online catalogue and found no available copies. Then, I happened to see it on the shelves of a local branch. Curiosity piqued, I returned to the web interface and discovered awful UX flow: you find the book, click "Book" format, see an entry about the book, click to check branch availability, and see it's not available. You have to notice the "other formats" section, click around in that, and it finds other editions, some of which are available. I've passed the issue on to the library who can do no more than pass it up to their software provider.

In rereading the novel, I find myself at an unusual boundary point. Usually, I retain a fairly good memory of a typical novel for a few years. Once I've waited for long enough, I've mostly forgotten it and can reread it reasonably anew. My memory of Consider Phlebas feels betwixt the two: as I read each scene, I have a fair idea where it'll go but I don't know what the coming scenes hold.

Thanksgiving was nice, R. kindly indulges me with her cooking. For dessert, the pecan pie seemed more popular than the pumpkin. On Friday, we finished up the savoury leftovers. We'll probably do something similar but smaller around Christmas when it is just me and R., other family being away in America and Asia then.

For watching the parade from here without paying, there is typically the option of various free streams (some clearly near each other) from random parts of the parade. I like to see the performances too so this year I took the option of simply finding some free not-NYC feeds that were well-positioned for their parade, e.g., I think we settled on Philly's in the end from some local station there.

I can't help but notice television streaming services raising their prices again. Most of them don't carry enough that I want to be worth the price they ask. I used to cover for this by subscribing to the couple that do while using DVD-by-post rental for late catchup on the one or two shows that I may want from each of the others. Though, Disney seemed to be tending not to release their shows also on DVD, and the by-mail services have also been growing more expensive, or ending altogether.

I wonder where this is going and how people respond. Fortunately, I don't have much time for engaging dramas at the moment anyway, and what's available for free here largely covers me. Still, I suspect that VPN services are doing well these days.