Furthermore: April 2004 Part 2

April 27, 2004

Dungeons and Dragons

Wow. Dungeons and Dragons is 30. I haven’t played any RPGs for over 10 years, but D&D was a huge part of my teenage and college years. Eventually we got fed up with D&D and went onto other systems like Warhammer RPG, but it’s amazing when I look back how much work I put into preparing materials for our sessions. Of course, then something like this would usually happen and I’d have to wing it.

Gerd Sommerhoff

I used to know Gerd through the CU Humanist Workshop, but I lost touch with him after I left Cambridge. A quick google now shows that he’s since died, so I thought I would just briefly remember him here.

• Times Obit


• Google Groups thread

There’s not a lot I can add to that really. The Humanist Workshop was a fun part of my time at University, and I got to meet some very interesting people and talk about issues of consciousness and religion. Gerd himself was usually quite charming, and full of interesting stories of his rather extraordinary life. As a poor student, I was also grateful for the fact that he would take me out to lunch occasionally when I was secretary of the group. I’m sure it flattered his ego to be seen out with a young man, although he was much too polite to make any kind of unwelcome advance.

April 26, 2004

TV and Radio

Couple of things I caught over the last week - one was May 33rd, a terrific drama about multiple personality disorder (or dissociative personality disorder). The actress playing the woman with the alternates was fantastic - very naturalistic.

I don’t want to get sucked into a discussion of multiple personality disorder, which (as far as I can tell) is perfectly real, but I thought the decision to explicitly link the disorder to satanic abuse was probably a mistake, given that the evidence for that is rather poor. Perhaps we were meant to see it as her interpretation of her experience, but to me, putting a camera on the scene made it part of objective reality. Powerful stuff anyway.

The other was Mitch Benn’s Crimes against Music on Radio 4. I’ve heard him on The Now Show and I think there are to be 4 shows in this series. He does a lot of excellent musical parodies - the Smiths one was superb - I actually thought it made a half-decent addition to the Smiths canon. Thursday at 6.30 I think.

Sudan Human Rights Crisis

I just read this piece about the situation in Sudan. I don’t know if it’s genocide; it’s certainly very bad. I shall get onto my MP as soon as possible. You might like to think about doing the same.

Fifth Sentence

Meme via Ongoing:

From “Options, Futures, and Exotic Derivatives” by Briys, Bellalah, Huu Minh Mai, and de Varenne: “If the underlying asset price is above 1000 at the option’s maturity date, the put is worthless and the call’s value corresponds to the intrinsic value.”

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. I would add to the instructions: point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

April 25, 2004

More Links

• Daring Fireball - great piece on software useability and Linux


• Kottke - interesting piece on knowing left from right, finding your way etc. Mainly for the comments - I had no idea there was so much intrinsic variation in the ability of people to orient themselves in space.



• The Register - why ID cards are a dumb idea.


• Howard Waldrop online! - if you haven’t read this guy’s stuff yet, start now. It’s sort of SF, but not really like anything you’ve read before.

Building Projects in Cambridge

There seems to be a lot of interesting development going on in Cambridge at the moment.

In transport, apart from the nonsense of the Guided Bus, there’s the new pedestrian/cycle bridge over the A14, linking Milton to the Park and Ride. And the new cycle bridge over the railway on Coldham’s Lane. There’s also the planned new bridge over the Cam somewhere near Riverside. It also looks like the Council will get round to re-opening the Cutter Ferry bridge.

Lots of ongoing or proposed building projects too:

• The Grand Arcade - redevelopment of the central block containing Lion Yard carpark, Robert Sayle et al. Robert Sayle are moving out to a new building by the Grafton Centre so that the work can start. I think when they come back they may move in line with the rest of the brand and be John Lewis.


• The new cinema and bowling alley by Hills Road/Cherry Hinton Road junction - what I think is called the Cattle Market site. It’ll be nice for me anyway - no need to trog into town to get to the cinema.


• The Botanic Garden is getting a big new section I believe. I think the University have bought the land on Brooklands Avenue which used to be a bowling club, and are turning it into an Education and Interpretation Centre and a dry garden (from what I half remember from Cam).



• The Fitzwilliam Museum - currently closed, and due to re-open in June(ish) I think. They’ve developed an interior courtyard to provide more space. Having been impressed by the British Museum’s development of the old reading room, I’m intrigued to see what they will do here in a smaller scheme.


• Looking a bit further ahead, the University still owns a lot of land to the North and West of Cambridge. They have a kind of outline plan of what they want to do with it that is quite interesting.


• Even more speculative is the CamToo project. They want to create a dual bit of the Cam.

Various Links

• Histon Parish Council - very comprehensive objections to the Guided Bus scheme


• via Bob the Angry Flower - hideously formatted discussion between Dave Sim and Alan Moore. I need to paste this into something where I can manipulate the fonts and colours before I actually try to read it in full.



• Simpol - idealistic, but quite a good idea of defining some global democratic standards, which you then ask your political representatives to sign up to, on pain of not voting for them.


• Crooked Timber - Europe and the War on Liberty. Very interesting piece on how the EU decision making process works in respect of Justice and Home Affairs matters.

Histon

We drove up to Histon today to have lunch at The Boot. Food was okay - I had a Thai stir fry, which tasted a bit bland, and my wife had a smoked mackerel salad. Fairly expensive for what it was (food plus a round of drinks was about £20 altogether).

Still, it was nice to be out in the sunshine, and there is a little play area for children, and plenty of parking space.

April 23, 2004

My CV

I’ve updated my CV (here in PDF and HTML) to reflect the fact that I’ve left Autonomy and joined Sungard. I’ve only been at Sungard a week so far, but I like the atmosphere much more than Autonomy, where I don’t feel I ever really felt comfortable. I don’t intend to badmouth them - they have some great people, and great technology, it’s just not the place for me.

Anyway, now I need to get back up to speed on COM, and also start learning a bit more about .NET and also about aspects of pricing and risk management in derivatives trading.