commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

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It may be that I’m just a good fit for it, or maybe it just came at the right time, because despite a somewhat lukewarm critical reception¹, I loved Iain Banks’ latest effort.

The Steep Approach to Garbadale tells the story of Alban, a renegade member of the successful Wopuld family, who is asked to return to his family in order to persuade them not to sell out the business to a huge American firm. But it’s not the only thing Alban has to think about: returning to his family means he must confront his feelings for his cousin Sophie, a lust he’s harboured for years, and one which has impaired more obvious relationship opportunities. There is also the looming issue of his mother’s suicide, little discussed since his childhood.

All this is nicely interspersed with contributions from Alban’s new friends (who are far more vulgar than him, and even more so than his family), flashbacks from the gap year he spent travelling, and other international trips he’s been on. Laugh-out-loud funny in places and touching in others, the novel is certainly a page-turner, even if the “twist” at the end is a long way from a revelation.

My only complaint is that Banks can’t help throw in his own² attacks against Bush, the Iraq war and feeding them through his characters like they were marionettes. Even though I agree with his politics, I’d prefer that he kept such sensitive subjects out of a book that really, doesn’t need them. The fact that having an American firm try to take over a smaller, British concern is a major plot point does not mean it needs to be politicised, even if it looks like it’s begging to be.

¹ I mean proper critics. See the Guardian review for reference.
² highly unsubtle, especially noticeable when coming from one with such a powerful command of the language

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So, I’ve finally upgraded this site to use a version 2.x series Wordpress. This version (2.3.1) includes tagging support built in, which was a big plus for me as I’d be looking at installing something like UTW, but putting it off because I knew I planned to upgrade. Installation/upgrade of Wordpress is impressively straightforward by the way.

Anyway, after going through and tagging most of my entries, it was clear that I had a small number of tags with like 20 posts, and then lots of others with 1-5, which meant I had a list of words with a couple of them highlighted, but unable to see the difference between a tag with 1 post and one with 4. Luckily, I know PHP.

The code below replaces the wp_generate_tag_cloud function in the wp-includes/category-template.php file. Essentially, rather than taking the default distribution of number of posts for a tag then calculating the size, it takes the natural log (aka ln or log^e), which results in a more even distribution, and so more similarly sized tags!

This code was marked up using the wonderful GeSHi.

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Yahoo! acquired Jumpcut over a year ago, but it can hardly be said to be making waves on the web. It’s a video sharing site (a la YouTube), but with emphasis on mash-ups, sharing editing etc.
Since I don’t actually have any use for this all I’ve done is sign up and post a video I took in Croatia.

The site (app?) seems to be attracting mostly adult material, possibly to Yahoo!’s disappointment. They’ve come under fire over this recently.

Edit: Actually, this post reminds me of 10 Seconds by Heather Champ.

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Not sure why, but this book has been on my pile of books to read for a long time. Possibly this was a mistake, because this is a truly superb novel.

Michael Owen is tasked with researching and documenting the influential Winshaw family, who have, for the last half-century or so, been furthering themselves at the expense of all others in the most unethical and selfish of ways. The work Owen is charged with researching is interwoven with events from his own more mundane life, and we begin to realise just how wide reaching the Winshaw’s influence is.

Unflinchingly socialist and politically charged on one page, flippant and funny the next, Coe relies somewhat on the reader being on his side before they begin. A people-centric view of the problems Thatcher caused us.

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Lightweight, too heavy on name-dropping and almost unreadable in places due to the words being obscured by the man’s ego, this is remains an extremely entertaining auto-biography. Enough amusing anecdotes are included to keep the reader from becoming bored, and the bits of inside info about the radio industry (largely included under the pretext that they’re required for clarity) are genuinely interesting.

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So I’ve been back in Manchester about a month, it feels great to be back in a proper city. While Peterborough had it’s charms, I find I prefer to be in a city with a larger feel to it - just walking through Manchester there is a buzz which I knew I’d been missing, but without quite knowing what it was.

Studying rather than “working” is a larger change though. Even though I have a fraction of the hours allocated for study/classes as I was working last year, it feels like I’m now working with greater intensity. I sense I’m also likely to miss the satisfaction of working for a client and having a product to produce - even if I did no work this year, few would even notice, let alone worry. It’s not that I need constant reassurance, but there is something to be said for a client who is vocal about their opinion on the results they’re seeing for a project.

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