Spring is here. Bah humbug March 2, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.2 comments
Sping is undoubtedly here, and what a pleasure it is to hear the sound of birdsong once more. How lovely to hear our feathered friends trilling their little hearts out as they advertise their prowess with their delightful repertoire of songs.
Except that you’re in the tree outside my bedroom window and IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT BLOODY NIGHT.
Go to sleep already. Everyone else is trying to.
The awesome responsibility of the blogger February 18, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.add a comment
Some readers are never satisfied.
I offer my apologies as follows:
- To Frank, who spent the entire weekend watching episodes of “The Prisoner”. Buck up, Frank, they only made seventeen, so you’re over halfway there.
- To David, who has now uploaded all his wine into CellarTracker (or at least Patti has), only to discover that he owns a substantial number of bottles that should have been drunk in 2003. Sounds like a Caymus party to me.
2008 King William’s College quiz January 6, 2009
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
The Guardian has published the 104th annual King William’s College Quiz. Just to remind you, this is a lethally difficult general knowledge quiz taken by the pupils of King Williams College, on the Isle of Man. The students take the test twice, once on sight before the holidays, and once, after what I assume is a pretty hectic couple of weeks of research, after their return from the Christmas holiday.
The questions are set by Dr Pat Cullen, who seems to have trained at the knee of Torquemada. He takes special care to phrase the questions so that skill in Google searching is of little or no help.
On my first pass over this year’s quiz, I think I was able to answer ten questions out of the 180, which is unusually good - I’d normally expect between two and five.
So, ladies and gentlemen, start your search engines! The quiz can be found on the school’s website here
And, to get you started, here’s question 17.6 from this year’s quiz:
17.6 – In which town did la Baronne de la Chalonnière encounter Alexander Duggan at the Hôtel du Cerf?
Where are they now? – the personal edition December 27, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in chorale, personal, worklife.add a comment
The note in Tony’s Christmas card wondered what had happened. This was a fair question, since verb. sap. has been completely silent since late July (not that it was particularly prolific before then). And since Tony is a substantial fraction of my readership, I feel impelled to bring things up to date.
What happened was that I got a job.
I’d been looking around, with steadily increasing conviction, since March, and I’d actually interviewed at a couple of places. Then, out of the blue, there came a suggestion from my ex-colleague and choir buddy Mike that I might consider talking to the company for which he, though ostensibly retired, was still putting in hours. The company was Agilis Solutions, based in Portland, Oregon and run by an old friend of Mike’s who, like him, was an ex-Unisys VP. I talked to a number of people at Agilis, liked what I heard, and, pretty much, that was it. I started in early August.
Agilis Solutions is a small software development house. Typically, we work with software companies facing challenges in bringing their products to market quickly and cost-effectively. We use a blended model which combines onshore technical leadership and project management with a strong group of smart, experienced offshore developers to allow projects to be completed more quickly, more cheaply and more effectively than would otherwise be possible.
So that’s the boilerplate out of the way.
From a personal perspective, it’s going really well. I mostly work from home, although more on that later. The project I’ve been working on is also Oregon-based, as is my project manager, so I spend a lot of time on Skype with Oregon and Ha Noi, Vietnam, which is where our group of developers is located. Lorraine and I share an office at home, which works remarkably well, even though it’s an understatement to say that it’s sometimes a tight fit. The people at Agilis Solutions are wonderful – supportive, outgoing and friendly. There are less then twenty of us, and it’s such a refreshing change to work in an organisation where you know everyone, your boss runs the company and what you do actually makes a difference.
I spent a couple of weeks in Springfield, Missouri in September, working with the technical lead for the customer. In October we decided we had to make things move a little more quickly. The initial plan was for me and the customer lead to spend two months in Ha Noi, working directly with the development team. Lorraine, the intrepid traveller and selectively occasional corporate wife, thought that this was a splendid idea, and started buying guidebooks while I was trying to organise visas. So, of course, it didn’t happen. The team decided that they liked the let’s-get-everyone-together plan, but the location was moved to Oregon. So I spent nine weeks in Portland living and breathing the customer’s application, finally returning home a couple of weeks ago. The work was intense, in a way which I hadn’t really experienced since my days in fly-and-fix field support twenty years ago, but there was a good positive atmosphere around what we were doing, and there were always my new friends at the Riverwood Pub to keep me sane, which they mostly did.
So there hasn’t been much room for anything else since August. Lorraine had a successful Sawdust Festival, her second, in July and August, but the Winter Fantasy festival in November and December was very subdued. No-one seemed to be buying anything. In a sense, though, the Festival is its own reward. We both love being there, seeing artists who have become friends in the space of two festival seasons – people like Christopher Jeffries (with his wife Jitka and their new son Ry), Greg Thorne and Ray Caruso. We’re both looking forward to next year.
There’s one final thing to record. The choir I’ve been singing with for almost fifteen years, the Saddleback Master Chorale, had a fund-raiser this year, something which, for some reason, has to be called an Opportunity Drawing. We sold just over 300 tickets at $25 each, and the prize drawing took place last weekend at the group’s holiday concert. Imagine our astonishment when my name was pulled from the hat! So, slightly shell-shocked, we’re now the proud owners of a four-night Junior Suite stay in any Fairmont hotel or resort in the US or Canada, plus round-trip airfare to get there and back. This is not going to be easy. Fairmont operates the Plaza in New York, the Empress in Victoria, BC, and – my nomination for the most beautiful place on the planet – Chateau Lake Louise in the Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. However, the current edition of the plan calls for us to use the prize to spend some time in Montreal, Lorraine’s birthplace, staying at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth. It’s not clear when we’ll fit this trip in, but be sure that we will, and I’ll talk about it here, I promise.
So that’s the brief update. Normal service will now resume.
(And, for readers with long memories, I’m still stuck on 1453!)
Hummingbird babies July 7, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in laguna beach, local, personal.1 comment so far
I suppose the gestation period of a hummingbird isn’t very long. Whatever, it seems that nature has taken its course and the two eggs we saw only three weeks ago have turned into these two hungry little critters. It won’t be long before they’re off and investigating the world around them. Certainly the nest won’t hold them for much longer.
Moving more mail into Gmail April 25, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in worklife.add a comment
I spent a lot of time some months ago moving substantial quantities of mail from a work-based Outlook mailbox into Gmail. I started on the next step yesterday – moving mail from the Entourage 2004 mailbox on my wife’s Mac into GMail, using the technique written up by Zoli Erdos – configuring an IMAP connection to Gmail, and mapping local folders to Gmail labels.
This didn’t go desperately smoothly, but it seems to be working now. The technique is comprehensively written up by William Smith on the Entourage Help blog. Unfortunately, as noted by commenters, there’s something screwed up in the process, and the timestamp you get in Gmail is not the original Received-Date. So the first attempt didn’t work, and I deleted (in Gmail) the messages with the bad timestamps.
Commenters came to my aid, describing the workaround of using a third mail account, configured using IMAP, and then setting Gmail’s Mail Fetcher to get the messages from the third account using POP. So I set up a temporary Gmail account, and gave it a shot. Well, that didn’t work either. For some reason, my Entourage aborts the IMAP upload to Gmail, in an oddly random manner. Some small number of messages are uploaded (and the number is not the same each time), and then Entourage throws up an “Error 1025″ (whatever that is), and a message of “Unable to append message to folder”.
So, back to my friends, William Smith’s commenters. There seemed to be evidence that Apple’s .Mac mail service could be used to supply the third mail account. So I signed up for a free trial, and tried again. This time, it all worked – almost. The messages uploaded to .Mac fine, and Google Mail Fetcher started pulling them in to Gmail. All went well – I transferred several thousand messages – until I got to a particular folder in Entourage’s mailfile. All the messages in this folder were uploaded to .Mac, Google Mail Fetcher reported, eventually (because this takes a serious while – no, I mean HOURS), that all the mails were fetched, but only half of them ended up in Gmail. Very odd.
This time, my buddies the commenters were no help, nor was the Gmail help system. I tried again, uploading the messages which had got lost to .Mac. Same thing. All uploaded OK, all pulled into Mail Fetcher OK, around half seemingly thrown on the Gmail floor. I spent most of this afternoon trying to work out what was going on, until, eventually, I had a forehead-slapping moment. I realised that the messages which were being thrown away were exactly the messages that I’d uploaded with bad timestamps way back in the first step, and which were still sitting in my Gmail Trash folder, waiting for the executioner’s axe. Gmail thought I already had these messages!
So, I emptied the Gmail trash, started over, and everything seems to be running sweetly.
Four fours – 1453? April 4, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
I’ve said this before, but it finally looks like the Four Fours quest has ground to a halt. I made lots of good progress on our trip to the East Coast, but it looks, for now at any rate, as though 1453 is where it stops. I’ve used all the tricks I know, and I’m stuck.
California Trip report – I February 15, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in food&wine.add a comment
We spent just over a week travelling in California. After a brief stopover with Lorraine’s high-school friend Monika in San Francisco, we headed up to Sonoma to vist Bill and Sandi, the first of our two sets of ex-Laguna Beach, ex-Len’s Wine Cite, friends.
We arrived in time for a late lunch, and were immediately introduced to the wines of one of Sonoma’s newer wineries, Roessler Cellars. Roessler’s 2005 Alder Springs Pinot Noir is just glorious, with sweet, ripe fruit, classic Pinot character, and great intensity. Afterwards, we wandered around downtown Sonoma for a while, looking in jewelry stores, before deciding to stop in to Sebastiani’s tasting room. There wasn’t a whole lot of time before closing, but we tasted through what they had. We ended up buying a couple of bottles of their 2006 “Casa De Sonoma” unoaked Chardonnay. We’re not great fans of Chardonnay, on the whole, unless it comes from Burgundy, but these wines were delicious, somewhat reminiscent of Chablis, with lovely crisp fruit and some minerally notes.
After dinner, Bill wondered idly whether we were interested in brandy, and if so, did we know about California brandy? We were, and, oddly enough, we did, although we weren’t aware of all the aspects of the remarkable story of Germain-Robin. Hubert Germain-Robin is a member of a French family which had been making fine cognac since the late eighteenth century. In 1981, Hubert was hitch-hiking in northern California, somewhat despondent about the fate of the family firm, which had just been taken over by the brandy colossus Martell. One day, he was picked up on the road by a guy called Ansley Coale. The two struck up a friendship, and by the next summer, Hubert had shipped a traditional still to Ansley’s ranch in Mendocino County and the two had started experimenting with distillation. Their first decision, which turns out to have been an inspiration, was to use premium California wine as the raw material, rather than the thin, insipid wines – normally made from Ugni Blanc - which form the foundation for most cognac. The results are dramatic. Germain-Robin brandies are just spectacular – gorgeous, smooth, complex nectars. People who might be expected to know are classing them among the world’s best distilled spirits.
But I digress, somewhat. It turns out that Bill is rather a fan of Germain-Robin brandies, and was surprised and delighted to discover fellow enthusiasts. So we spent a good deal of the evening performing critical comparisons of the examples he had, and went to bed feeling no pain.
It’s probably fair to say that we wouldn’t have timed the private tasting at Roessler any earlier than 10:00am the following day. But, like true professionals, we were there on time, ready for action. We tasted through about half a dozen Pinot Noirs, some from single vineyards, like the Alder Springs we’d had the previous day, some what they called appellation wines, where the wines are made from grapes from several vineyards. All of the wines were really lovely expressions of Pinot Noir, made in tiny quantities (only 137 cases of the 2005 Alder Springs were made). We left with some of the Alder Springs and some of Roessler’s 2005 Hein Family Vineyard.
From there, Sandi took us up the road to Arrowood, where we tasted some of Dick Arrowood’s beautiful Cabernets, including the 2003 Monte Rosso and the 2002 Reserve, and some Syrahs They’re certainly excellent wines, but it was difficult to taste Cabernets with the memory of the fragrant Roessler Pinot Noirs still on our palates and in our minds. I should probably also add that our tasting experience was not improved by the arrival of a party of visitors who seemed to have bathed in perfume, and who, we discovered as we left, had pitched up in a Hummer with Idaho plates and had parked in the handicapped spot (with no sign of a permit). Lots of hot buttons there – although I hasten to add that the great State of Idaho is not one of them.
The next stop was Healdsburg, about thirty miles north of Sonoma, where we paused briefly for lunch, after which it was time to check out a couple more tasting rooms. The first was Williamson Wines, where we were graciously hosted by the co-owner, Dawn Williamson. Dawn had an interesting approach to tasting wine, which we liked a lot. She was arguing strongly for the symbiotic relationship between wine and food, presenting each wine with a morsel of appropriate food – a little sliver of Stilton, or a tiny piece of lamb. We thought this really worked well. Finally, we stopped in at La Crema, where I was a little surprised. I’d always thought of La Crema as a winemaker at the less expensive end of the scale, with good quality wines in the $15-$20 region. Turns out that they also make a series of super Pinots and Syrahs at premium prices, and also some exquisite wines, the Nine Barrel Chardonnay and Pinot Noir wines, which run close to $100 a bottle. We came away with a bottle each of the the 2005 Sonoma County Syrah and the 2005 Russian River Pinot Noir.
And then it was time to return to Sonoma, for an early dinner and an early night, with a busy day in prospect, about which I’ll write later.
Four fours update January 4, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.2 comments
I may have neglected to mention that one of the permitted Four Fours techniques is the use of ‘.4′. So, you can burn two fours on 
So, it turns out that
Dammit, this is like pulling teeth. I’m now staring at 1195, which is staring back at me with a mean, uncompromising expression.
Four Fours unblocked – after forty years January 1, 2008
Posted by Peter Hornby in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
The New Year seems to have started pretty auspiciously for me. I was fooling around this morning with a little maths problem which has been bugging me every now and then for, well, essentially my whole life. Every couple of years, I’d take it out, give it some mostly aimless thought, get nowhere, and put it away again. Today I played around with it for about twenty minutes, and found the solution. It’s not quite Andrew Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, but I was totally astonished and delighted that I’d found what what I’d been looking for, after having been stuck since I was maybe 10 years old.
Allow me to explain. Don’t laugh too much.
When I was about eight years old, sometime around 1963-1964, my teacher, a wonderfully inspiring man called Dr Fred Everett, presented the class with a challenge, which he called “Four Fours”. He asked us to take each integer in turn, and represent it using the digit ‘4′, used four times. Each use of ‘4′ could be modified in various ways. You could raise it to a power, you could take its square root, and raise that to a power, you could use the factorial – and there were several other possibilities which we asked about at the time, and which were ruled legal or illegal. The idea was to see how far you could get.
Let’s try a few easy examples.
Clearly, the first few hundred are pretty easy, although a few caused us some thought. Once you get into the high hundreds, the values you can construct from the basic rules start becoming a little wider spaced, and you have to start getting inventive. We were stuck on 811 for some time.
With that out of the way things moved along fairly easily for a while. We asked for a ruling on
and were told that it was acceptable, not that it would have been too hard to come up with another answer. So time went by, and after a few months only my friend William Irving and myself were pushing on. We arrived eventually at
and then ran into a brick wall. Neither of us could solve 1191, and after a while, we both gave up. This would be around 1965-1966.
All of my results were written in a notebook which moved with me from place to place, which is a miracle in itself. Whenever I’d clear out a cupboard in preparation for a move, I’d run across the book. get it out, think about 1191 for a while, and put it away again. The book came out again yesterday as I was freeing up some space in one of our storage closets, and I started thinking about 1191 again, with no expectation of success. This morning, the book was still on my desk, so I sat down, made some notes, and, within twenty minutes, had come up with
I walked around for a while, not quite believing that the solution had turned out to be so simple. I even broke out a calculator to make sure that my arithmetic was correct.
So there we are. It’s New Year’s Day 2008, and I can start writing in the Four Fours notebook again, after a gap of over forty years. It’s a very strange feeling.
Happy New Year!
Update: Bugger. Now I’m stuck on 1194. Check in here again on my 90th birthday.
