The Vertical Puddle

I recently added the game Scramble to my Facebook profile. This turned out to be a big mistake — it’s been a major drain on productivity. What’s even more dispiriting is that after nearly 100 rounds of the monster I have yet to equal my score on my very first game!

It’s not what I expected. I thought with a name like that it would bear a resemblance to Scrabble but it’s an entirely different game. Sadly, an affinity for Scrabble seems to be detrimental to playing Scramble — you score only for the length of a word whereas if you’re used to Scrabble you end up focussing on the difficult letters. In Scramble you get considerably more points for RENDERER than DZHO and it’s taking a little while to adapt. There’s also something about being set up against a clock with my (lack of) typing speed that somehow makes the whole thing seem a little frustrating.

This set me thinking. Scramble is very compulsive, but in an annoying way rather than a fun one. Why do I find it less fun than, say, Scrabble or Buyword? I guess there’s something about interactivity there — Scramble is a sole pursuit and the so-called games consist of trying to get a better score than others with the same starting point. On the other hand, you have some control in Buyword over what letters you get and what you leave for others. In Scrabble you get to control the openings where your opponents can play — indeed, my style of playing Scrabble is all about closing off areas of the board to restrict possibilities for opponents.

The other thing is that Scramble is one of those games where a small difference in ability makes a large difference to the scores. A game of Scramble consists of playing five times; all but one of the games I’ve played so far has finished with a 5-0 scoreline. Even though the individual rounds might have close scores, you win or lose against the same opponent fairly consistently. That gives little incentive to try once you lost the first round of a game.

And yet it’s addictive. I would try to suggest some reasons why, but I have one more round to finish off…

[Scrabble is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Buyword is a registered trademark of Face2Face, Scramble is run by Zynga.com and I assume they’ve trademarked it.  Please don’t sue me.]

Estate agents are, in general, weasels.

It only took a quite phonecall to a bank to confirm how much I could borrow (”That much? I thought there was a credit crunch on…”) and it was time to look at properties that had the potential to become Mazumdar Towers. I’d assumed that this would be an easy part of the process — possibly quite fun too as you get to poke around the minutiae of people’s lives, seeing how others live as you poke about in their cupboards and drawers.

Estate agents, however, want to optimise their time so pack as many viewings into as short a time as possible. In this case they booked various properties (often a reasonable distance away from each other) at half hour intervals. This itself wouldn’t be so bad except that in only one case did the agent himself actually turn up. In all other cases it was left up to the vendor to do the show-round. So why couldn’t the programme have been a little more relaxed? Graaah! Apparently the phrase “I’d like to see both these properties in the same half-day so I only need to take half a day off work” seems to be a little difficult for agents to understand too…
Some of the sellers didn’t seem to be impressed with the agents either because of the small numbers of viewings they were getting (”You’re the only one this week”). I guess this isn’t the agents’ fault — they’re not responsible for the market dropping, though they were more than willing to encourage the rise of the housing bubble. There seems to be an unwillingness to take the rough with the smooth though and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were stoking up their commissions to enable them to retain a shopful of staff playing Minesweeper(TM). But I digress…

I got to meet some interesting folk on the viewings. One vendor had several friends in common with me and another was looking at me curiously until she finally got around to asking, “Did you lead Alpha at St Barnabas Church a while ago?”. To my shame, I didn’t remember her even though the course had made a significant impact on her and her husband’s lives.
Received wisdom is not to view things alone so I took a current housemate on most of the viewings. On one level this turned out to be useful when he spotted things I didn’t, but he also had an unrealistic expectation of what the current owner might be taking and leaving and I tried hard not to cringe as he prodded the washing machine and asked “So it this staying?”.

All the marketing-speak about “finding your dream home” doesn’t really prepare you for the reality of deciding on a house having viewed several. The fact is that you will not find the perfect home (or, if you do then you won’t be able to afford it) so you have to work out which compromises you feel best able to live with: good living space or good condition, large bedrooms or large kitchen, close to the city centre or lower in price? As someone who doesn’t like upsetting people, I found it really hard to turn down the places I didn’t work as I liked the owners and there was nothing wrong with the house either — it was just the wrong sort of right.
I phoned the estate agent to sort out a second viewing for the house I was most interested in only to find the agent I’d been dealing with had ‘left at short notice’. Still, his replacement was more than happy to arrange a second trip and take an offer off me. With the lease on the rented house only having three months left to run I decided to put a date on the offer, offering the asking price if I could be in by a certain date and a lower price if there were any delays. This would come back to bite be later.

I was amazed at the number of friends who were critical of me offering to meet the advertised offer price. It does seem to be accepted as a bit of a game to try to drive the price as low as possible rather than seeking to be fair, particularly since the vendors were going through a break-up and this would have just added to their problems. It’s easy to forget that in circumstances like this there are real people on the other side of the deal, particularly when you end up doing most of your dealing through intermediaries.

So I’ve made an offer and they’ve taken the house off the market. One of the estate agents is still bombarding me (even now, four or five weeks later) with suitable properties despite being told that I’ve put in an offer elsewhere. What makes this even more galling is that these unsolicited details are coming from the agency that sold me the house!

Buying a house is one of the most stressful things you can do. Honestly. When you get these “How stressed are you?” questionnaires in the Sunday supplements, the number of points you can be awarded for buying and moving house is generally near the top, right up there with the divorce and the family bereavement and several places above a sacking.

So why do we make it so stressful? After all, it’s not like we imbue large amounts of aggro to the act of buying a potato. And while I’ve got heavily stressed buying my way on public transport at times, it never seems to figure in the questionnaire.

With all this in mind, So far only one part of the process has been a major ordeal but there’ve been a load of minor irritations along the way. I thought I’d jot a few of them down; you never know — it might leave someone else forewarned.

For me, the first stress point came with timing. Despite my comment about the potato, it does seem that people who’ve not been through the process don’t have an appreciation of (a) how long the whole thing takes or (b) how far along you can get and still see the whole thing derail and unravel around you. I announced my intention to my housemates to go house shopping and shortly afterwards we were talking about not renewing our lease on the current rented house. That’s obviously lent a certain amount of urgency to things…

Anyway, that’s it for now. In the next post I’ll comment on the pitfalls of viewing places.

We’re often told how important a good brand is in the business world, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it demonstrated quite as graphically as last Thursday.

Cambridge’s new, high-class shopping centre opened round the corner from the office so I thought that I’d go and check it out.  Various stores selling designer clothes and designer coffee proclaimed their names on the front of the store and had no shortage of custom — it was, after all, the opening day and I was far from being the only rubbernecker.

But one store was even more crowded than the others.  So crowded, in fact, that you’d have needed a crowbar to be able to force any more bodies into the room.  Yet it was also the only store which had no name outside — just a single, widely-recognised logo…

Nick has posted a link from his Facebook profile to an article in the New York Times about in-car GPS systems sending people into tiny villages and obscure lanes. The thing that always irritates me about such articles is their failure to identify the offending brands and to tar the whole technology with the standards of the worst. Even with my small experience of SatNav systems I’ve learned that there are major differences between them and the route-finding systems they use.

I originally bought a Sony unit (a NV-U50 if anyone’s really interested). I used this happily for just over a year and was never dissatisfied with its route-finding abilities; it did have a tendency to favour major roads a little excessively — for example, taking me an extra 15 miles to avoid going through the Great Metropolis of East Dereham — but that also gave me confidence that it would be unlikely to ever take me along a bad route even if the unit’s lack of local knowledge meant that it would never be an optimal one. Sadly, the adaptor gizmo that connects the unit to the car’s cigarette lighter came apart just after the warranty ran out and Sony make it next to impossible to obtain a new one. I should have remembered from my experiences with a Vaio that Sony’s only straightforward repair path is buying a new unit, but some people never learn. It can still be charged from the mains, but is then limited to a journey length of less than the battery life (currently a little over two hours).

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to use a friend’s Tomtom on a couple of occasions. Both times, the unit tried to get me to join or leave the M11 by a service road — once near Saffron Walden and once around Epping Forest. Not very impressive, but at least they sell replacement parts.

I guess what I really want is something with Sony’s route-finding algorithm but Tomtom’s support model. Sadly, all the comparative reviews of SatNav units I’ve come across talk about the battery life, the usability of the menu system, the straightforwardness of obtaining new maps…but never the quality of the navigation itself. This shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise though — astrologers have proved for millennia the futility of seeking guidance from the heavens…

Marcin has ranted eloquently on the experiences of no-frills flying, but I think something I recently observed at Stuttgart Airport brings the lunacy to a whole new level.

I was flying with Germanwings and they showed how much they cared for their passengers by allowing those with small children through the gate first — in a country where getting to the front of any line is seen as a demonstration of your testosterone levels, it’s wise to spare them the crush. Next, they showed the other things they care for by allowing through people who’d booked with a Germanwings credit card. Finally, the rest of us got through.

Through the gate, that is. On the other side we were all herded onto an airport bus which waited until there was nobody left to come through after which it then trundled across the tarmac to the plane. Of course, once the bus opened its doors, there was a general scrummage to get on the plane leaving all the young families — who’d been so carefully sent through first — to take up the rear and sit in dispersed seats.

They have a nice tradition in Baden-Württemberg during the grape-picking season. Many good German wines get grown in the area, particularly the German reds that are so hard to find outside the country, and the Germans feel the need to celebrate them.

Farms in the area that do their own livestock slaughtering open up a barn or hall and serve home-reared meat and mugs of wine. It’s a convivial atmosphere — you’re sat at long tables instead of your own private one — and a cheap way to eat yourself silly — I’ve seen smaller joints roasted for four people!

They’re quite transitory affairs, opening for about a week, and the range of foods served is relatively small. They’re only allowed to serve boiled meat, perhaps to stop them being a threat to the local restaurant trade. There’s no real advertising. If there’s a besen open in a village, they hang an old-fashioned twig broomstick (a besen in German, hence the name) in the centre of the village and another just outside the barn. But unless you’re very sharp-sighted it’s easier to find a local who knows where they are.

So you have these social occasions that spring up in barns, only get communicated by word of mouth and are gone as soon as they appear. Perhaps the besen is the German equivalent of the rave!

It’s now four weeks since Mum died. Over the past four weeks I’ve tried to write something about how I was feeling, perhaps as a cathartic exercise, but anything I did seemed banal — after all, what can you say about the person who gave birth to you and nurtured you for your whole lifetime without finding that you barely scratch the surface.

But there’s another reason I’ve failed to write anything. Grieving is more than an emotion — it fundamentally alters who you are. I’ve barely managed to motivate myself to do anything over the last month.

That really surprised me. Perhaps it shouldn’t have; when Mum died, the hospital gave us a booklet about the grieving process. It talked about some of the things you may experience — abnormal sleep, stomach problems, jelly legs — and assures you that they’re quite normal in the circumstances. What it didn’t tell you is how long this went on for, though the BBC site gave some indication that it might be weeks and months rather than days.

It’s left me realising how unsympathetic I’ve been to grieving friends in the past. I’ve often seen them moping after a fortnight and been pastoral on the surface while wondering why they haven’t got over it. That’s not going to happen again, but I wish there’d been an easier way to learn that particular lesson.

Life’s beginning to get back to normal now. It’s had to, of course — nobody else has stopped. But one thing seems to have changed over the last couple of days. Three weeks ago, at the funeral, Dad and Sheila asked me to do the eulogy. When I gave it, I talked about the deep hole that losing Mum had left and that I couldn’t see how it would ever heal. Now, at least, I can see that it probably will. And that’s progress.

I’ve finally upgraded the blogging software I’m running. With any luck it shouldn’t make any difference to the reader, but it should make life more difficult for any Very Bad People trying to break my server. All the same, I may have broken something myself inadvertently, so if you’re not able to read this then please let me know…

It was that moment we all dread. I’d been happily snapping away with my camera in the area around Lake Maggiore and had loads of photos stashed away on the memory card. Some were even, in my admittedly biased opinion, quite good.

Then, on day seven of the eight-day trip, disaster struck. I took a photo and the display in the viewfinder said: “Image not stored”. I looked a bit more carefully and found that my flash card had got corrupted and was claiming to be blank. Sadly this meant no photographs in the spectacular palace gardens on the Borromean Islands and, I feared, no photos at all other than what I could take on the last day before the flight left.

Fortunately I had another card back at the hotel, so when we got back from the excursion I swapped cards and was able to confirm that it was the card at fault rather than the camera. That was a bit of a relief, but I was still rather upset at losing the photos. I kept the card anyway — I’d heard of a colleague recovering data off a duff card before so it might be that he could get some of the pictures back.

When I got home, a short session with Google threw up a package called PhotoRescue that looked as if it would be worth investigating; not only did impartial reviewers sing its praises about the way it had got them out of a tight spot, but they distributed a free demo that would display thumbnails of any recoverable images. The problem was that it needed to connect to the card via a card reader rather than through the camera and it was some time since I last saw mine…

Fortunately one of my housemates came to the rescue and lent me his card reader. Unfortunately it wasn’t particularly standard and I spent a couple of hours surfing to fing the requisite drivers. Eventually I had it working and, trying not to hold my breath, I fired up PhotoRescue.

Well, it wasn’t particularly fast — I think it reconstructed the image files from all the fragments on the card — but it managed to retrieve all but the last two photographs I’d taken. I registered the program on the spot and within an hour was reunited with my pictures. All the images included in this post were resurrected by this.

I guess what impressed me most was that in a culture where most things are sold by a torrent of overstated hyperbole, it was refreshing to find a piece of software with worked almost miraculously and which seemed so understated on its web page. They were able to get away by letting satisfied customers do the publicity for them. And, having been baled out by PhotoRescue, I can understand why they’re so willing to sing its praises.

I’m not taking any chances next time though. When I go off to Prague tomorrow I’ll be taking four fresh memory cards. It’s nice to have a safety net, but it’s even nicer to spread the risk and not have to depend on it…