...to say that Kim’s project from the last week, our graphic alphabet, is online in her blog. The rules of the game were the following: only ‘found’ objects could be used [this rule was set up after she photographed the letter ‘R’, and threatened to ransack all shopfronts in the area looking for other letters—that we can do another day…]; no arranging things, they had to be as is… an exception to this was the frying pan, posed on a sheet of paper.

In fact we probably took four times the number of images that are displayed, threw out a quarter because they were no good—out of focus was not a criteria, that the shape was not present enough [‘F’ is a borderline case…]. Then Kim chose her final 26. Perhaps we’ll also do numbers next time.

BTW, the code to display the letters is based on what I use on the photos page here. Just scrub your mouse pointer over the thumbnails and the big picture will change. That’s it.

. . . . .

On an update front, I did a few corrections to Emiline’s baby wishlist application following her trials [and my errors]. It seems nearly finished. Oh, and I started work again on Pirates—just notes and jottings—I’ll be back to it seriously once Kim goes back to her mother.

I was working on Emiline’s baby-gift manager and come across a sort of bug. A design flaw, to be exact. I’ll explain…

A design flaw is like a bug—i.e. the application doesn’t work as intended—except the cause is not in the code, it is in the way the thing is designed. You could say that it was meant to be like that. Now this isn’t the end of the world, it won’t stop this fonctionning, but for a small number of people, and possibly for emiline, it can be an annoyance. Sort of like a dancing paperclip at your elbow that doesn’t let you do anything while it’s jiggling. Nothing serious, but after it has popped up for the fifteenth time in a row, you just want to take down the double-barrel and…

So what is the problem?

I use the e-mail address as a means to generate a unique key. This allows me to identify the user, note the gift that was reserved, and the identity allow the user to come back, update and change things. All this is fine. no problems. except…

• a small percent connecting in will not have an e-mail address. They will be people who will want to look, but aren’t very internet savvy.
• a small number of people will make an error when they type their address, and, as it is coded on the site, and so it will not be recognised the next time when they retype. [making them type twice is no solution as they can duplicate the error, or cut/paste between fields].
• a small number of people will have multiple e-mail addresses and will forget which one they used.
• there is a possibility that a person will change e-mail address, and forget that she did so…

All in all, these represent probably between 1-5 people in all, but they will also represent all the work, heartaches, and problems to solve.

That is the flaw.

I need to find a way to bypass the inevitable errors that users will make, all the while keeping things simple, and needing minimal intervention.

Second-hand grail, anyone?

I have put up a photo gallery of Akio’s drawings that are still on the walls from last Saturday’s dinner party. He ran them off as A2+ size photocopies, and we stuck them up with Patafix all around the flat. Enjoy.

...he says, wiping his arm across his forehead, in a gesture he has seen in countless cowboy films as the hero looks up from that dirty, sweaty task, that someone has just gotta do, surveys the horizon and wonders how much time is left before the last reel. “Update… Just what has been happening back at the homestead?”

So here is an update.

The house is currently overrun with kids. There is Moïse and there is Kim. That makes two. That sure doesn’t seem like overrun. No, just wait until it happens to you.

Moïse is the twelve-year-old son of a friend of Ludivine’s. He normally lives out in the wilds, an hour’s drive from Toulouse. Ludivine proposed that he come up and spend a week in Paris. Kim, well, she’s Kim.

Individually both are wonderful. We had Moïse for two days before Kim turned up. Everything went fine, we managed to go out and about, do things, visit the Louvre [which—it should be noted—seems to have solved the queueing problem, as this is the first time that I have just turned up and walked straight in…], and generally walk around Paris.

Put them both together and they giggle, run off, and seek to beat each other at video games. Kim does her best not to listen when I ask [and then shout] that she calm down. And thereyougoagain-that’slife!

Apart from that, I have been working on an on-line gift-list generator for Emiline, so that she can put up a wishlist for things for the baby. In this way, people can connect to it, opt-in, and manage their gifts. I ran up a dummy, started coding, got the dummy working with fake data in about three days. Worked most of the kinks out. Got Mimi to check things in IE PC. All was going fine. Then I thought to look at things in IE Mac. The layout was completely off kilter. This is all HTML+CSS compliant code, and mostly CSS1 as that is the most completely implemented in most browsers. It was, as I said, all over the place.

It then took me the whole morning—4 hours, solid work—to disassemble the whole presentation, and then rebuild it in so that it worked in all, and IE Mac too.

So that’s life.

And I haven’t spoken about the Japanese food evening with Akio on Saturday night that has left us with enough food in the fridge to feed a regiment for the coming week. And blow-ups of his artworks all over the walls that I hesitate to take down.

End of update.

Heatwaves in Paris are foul. They may be the same elsewhere, I don’t know, I don’t live there.

They are foul when the air is so hot, so viscous, that I can’t breathe, and just sit here panting. They are foul when the air is just a solid mess of smell: urine, exhaust fumes, dust, pollen, soot, and I don’t know what. My eyes burn. Exposed areas like arms and neck, itch and burn. Showers bring only temporary respite.

Besides leaving Paris for somewhere else [somewhere like Iceland, which has been a continuing fantasy for the last couple of years; the thought of glaciers, cold water, cold air…] the only way to sit out a heatwave is to barricade yourself indoors during the day, opening and closing windows and shutters as the day progresses, maximizing draughts, and minimizing sunlight. And then throw the windows wide open at night.

In our flat, the sun rises over the kitchen and the bathroom; by ten o’clock the heat makes even short visits to those rooms impossible. Of course, they have no shutters, not being on the street side of the building. There was a sort of blind made of wooden strips hanging outside the kitchen window when we arrived, but while the landlady was showing it to us, she pulled, and half of the arrangement fell into her hands. Her ‘handyman’ took the rest of it down and disposed of it. [Her handyman gets inverted commas as he was, as these guys tend to be, slow, bolshy, inefficient, downright dangerous at times, as well as a bare-faced liar. We left him with our second set of keys so that he could finish ‘repairs’ before we moved in, which he didn’t manage to do. Then, because Ludivine was going away for a week and wanted to be able to let herself back into her own flat when she returned, we asked him for the keys, telling that it would be nice also if he could manage to finish the work, but the keys would be fine anyway… he missed two meetings—is it really difficult to drive over from the town after next and leave a set of keys in a letterbox?—and finally I had to pull a wobbly on him and bawl out, not only him, but his poor wife too—they were preparing to go to the airport and leave for Portugal or something, and dropping off the keys here on the way would make them late, you understand; I ask you—in order to have her jump in the van and drop the keys off before picking up the kids from school. And the half-botched work here was never finished anyway…] Sound of small argh, as all of this comes back.

Anyway, this all left us without protection from the sun in the kitchen. At the time we didn’t worry, we hadn’t yet realised that Paris was about to go into heatwave mode. And stay there until the tarmac melted.

The bathroom had a peculiar white roller blind inside the window. I say ‘had’ becuase after a week that too fell down. I say ‘peculiar’ because you could either open the window, or have the blind down, but not both at the same time. So, I hear you say, it’s not to protect from the blistering morning heat, but to provide a degree of intimacy during one’s daily ablutions.

Except it wasn’t.

The windows are frosted and made of a sort of patterned glass like bathroom windows often are; the bathroom is quite big and at a such an angle to the flats opposite, which are at a distance of about 300 metres anyway, that the only part of the bathroom remotely visible is if you jumped up on top of the washing machine with the windows wide open. The only way anyone is likely to see anything through that window, supposing they are even looking in this direction, is if you climb up on a chair and rub yourself against the damn thing! And even then you would be but a vague and fuzzy form, and most people would think, ‘Hey! They’re drying a light-oche jumpsuit up against the bathroom window’, and not, ‘Hey! Those weird neighbours opposite are rubbing lithe, naked, bods up against the bathroom window.’

So yesterday I put the broken blind back up. Except I put it back to front which means that now there is sufficient room to leave the window on the catch [à l’espagnolette it is called here, where the window opens inwards, and is caught between the other window and the big knob that you have to turn to open it; this means the window can be shut firmly and not openable from outside, all the while having an opening where air—if there is any—can pass through.] This might diminuish the temperature in the bathroom by a couple of degrees, bring it from a mild 44°C down to a friendly 42…

During the morning, the shutters on the other side of the house, the side facing the road where the kids love to hold conversations by shouting at each other from opposite ends of the street, all the while riding their souped-up mopeds that screeeeam like irate sewing machines on amphetamines, not counting the singing and swearing drunks, the police-car sirens, the ambulance sirens, the fire-engine sirens, the people screaming into mobile phones, the buses, the bass boomboomboom of the ‘music’ inside the cars that makes the building vibrate, the revving trucks and all the idiots who klaxon when they are stuck behind the buses when the traffic lights change and they can’t understand why the queue isn’t advancing… That road then… And you have to remember that the shutters protect us, just as much, from the noise as from the heat and the light. So in the morning these are open, to pull in some cool air.

Starting at around one in the afternoon, the sun is overhead and windows must be closed on both sides—well, windows on the bath and kitchen side, shutters on the other—as the air is being heated equally all over and there is no shade, no temperature difference, because it is the difference that creates draughts. At this point you have either filled the flat with enough cool air to sit out the afternoon, or you will just slowly broil in your own juices.

As the afternoon progresses, the sun moves, shade gradually increases on the bath/kitchen side. It is now possible to reopen the windows there, and incite small draughts of air to flutter across the way. Enough to play over your skin a little as you lie, panting and sweating, and naked on the bed.

The only time that the house actually cools down is at night. In fact, the best thing to do is to open up all the windows and shutters as wide as possible in order to allow the night air, when it cools sufficiently around four in the morning, to come in and replace yesterday’s hot, damp, muggy, supply.

Which is why I don’t understand why, when I get up in the morning, all the windows that I opened before going to bed are closed.

It seems that this is a mixture of ‘The cool draughts during the night make my muscles ache…’, or—and this is where we move into the irrational—‘I am afraid that during the night a burglar will climb up the walls, slip in through the wide-open windows, and raid the flat while we are sleeping’.

It should be noted that we live on the second floor of a five-storey building that probably dates from around 1910; nice high ceilings… Even a ladder won’t reach up to our windows. Spiderman could probably manage it, but I think he’s busy elsewhere. There are no drainpipes to shimmy up, and cracks between bricks and stones are at a minimum. You could probably throw a grapnel up, catch it in the wrought ironwork in front of the windows, and pull yourself up; although looking at the joints around the ironwork, I’d say that you’d have a fifty-fifty chance of pulling that clean out of the wall, and down on top of you. Put mildly, our chances of being burgled in our sleep are not high.

And we haven’t got anything to steal anyway.

It is at times like that I can understand how there came to be a blind in the bathroom.

All I can say is that, in another six months, the heatwave will be over and all this will be past.

If we survive until then, of course.

We rented the DVD to Signs. Ludivine had already seen it and so had resisted all my previous suggestions that we book it out. We have a sort of unwritten agreement that we can’t insist on seeing films that the other has already seen. If I remember rightly, that night she was feeling tired and was headed for bed. So I grabbed the disk.

When we got home, she decided that she wasn’t that tired and so, in fact, we watched this together.

It all started off very nicely. It was a good tight screen play that read like a short story. A real economy of means and a nice series of character vignettes. (I wondered why they wanted a doctor for the dog, not a vet. I imagined that even in a small rural town there would be one. I was right. But this prepared nicely for when we met M. Night Shyamalan in a cameo role… as the vet.)

And now a short aside… I was disappointed by the build up about The Sixth Sense and all this atmosphere of ‘Don’t give away the end. This is dumb. It is obvious not only from the beginning that the character played by Bruce Willis is dead, not because we see him killed rather horribly, but the cold that surrounds him and the way that no-one talks to him. I’m sorry, I don’t need this as a twist, I saw this as a normal part of the film, and the revelation at the end of the film was overkill: If the kid has to come to terms with what he is seeing—which is not always nice—then who better that one of the ‘unhappy’ dead to help him along. To that extent, it reminds me of the Ring where it always seems that the girl in the well just needs recognition, pity and a fair burial to stop what she is doing. She’s not evil, she’s just extremely distressed…

So signs had this very small, neat, almost painterly cinematographic style, that built things up in small touches. And then suddenly we have flesh-eating aliens wandering about the place… Sorry?

It’s not that the FEA were badly done—they were. Very. They would have been better, and more scary had they stayed invisible. But of course then we couldn’t have seen the effects of the water. But did we need that? And did we need the aliens?

The subject of the film—and this was the failing of pitching it as a horror film—was the Reverend’s—well played by Mel Gibson—loss of faith. This was one of the points that was nicely sketched in right from the start. This stark, wooden, performance, did convince me that this was some hollow man. And his emptiness hurt.

So why the FEA? These were then the device to confront Reverend Graham’s faith following the death of his wife. Did we really need some worldwide FEA invasion?

Now imagine the film without the TV. Imagine that it had gone on the blink early. No Mexican episode. No Brazil video. No outside knowledge. Imagine that the creature holding the boy, Morgan, was mistily trying to connect in to his surroundings, and was not just some woman in a rubber suit.

A much better film.

Oh well. Don’t say that I didn’t warm you…