Ape::Tracks

Two Fantasy Worlds

I'm still steadfastly refusing to join Facebook but I've given in and joined LinkedIn, the dull but apparently useful social networking site for adults and those who can sometimes pass as adults, such as myself.

I'm also definitely weakening on my plan to avoid MMORPGs. I'm much too much of an old-timer RPG-snob to dabble in chatrooms disguised as cartoony Warhammer-knockoffs (I've never liked any of Warcraft's incarnations) and I'm still not fully recovered from my MUD days (those nightmares involving rapidly scrolling green text, struggling to trigger the macros in time...) but the EVE Online demo is definitely fun. Hard SF space opera, piracy and capitalism. Strong Vernor Vinge influences. Drone swarms. Sensible navigation (tell the ship where to go, and it handles things for you. No joysticks, no already extinct WW2 dogfight physics). Spaceships, banks, insurance, trading, huge battles, missions. It's a 1980s 'Elite' player's fantasy made real.

Best of all, it looks fun without investing too much valuable time. There's a chance I might subscribe.

Quadrastate

I bought this album when it first appeared, on vinyl. I've not played it for years since I sold my hifi while scraping together enough cash to move house but recently noticed it on CD at Amazon, and realised that buying the CD was easier than buying a new amp.

The CD includes a few extra track, including Let Yourself Go which I bought after hearing it on John Peel's show back in my sixth form days, and absolutely loved. Hearing it all again almost two decades later I'm struck by just how bloody good it all is.

Spore War update

We moved on to check the living room, and more mold was found, although thankfully not as much. Small patches by the side of the sofa, a few specks on the wall behind the shelves. Fibreboard areas on the backs of Ikea furniture were infected again, but not as badly. The sofabed doesn't seem to have been hit yet, but shows sign of humidity: the fold-out part hasn't been used for a year or so, and opening it up revealed two rusted areas.

The worst patches are once again associated with items from the old basement flat, and items piled up. I think the fan we sometimes use to help dry clothes might be blowing moisture behind furniture, so it might be best to rely on the dehumidifier when the windows are closed.

Fortunately most of the room is OK. The inside wall is fine. I think some ancient Warhammer relics buried in a cupboard might have gone off, and the Mario DDR mats I might admit to owning have also, bizarrely, picked up the yellow mold underneath, but so far nothing too bad has been discovered. I've breathed in another large quantity of tea tree oil vapour.

Our electricity bill is going to be huge this month after trying to wash most of the flat, wash all our clothes, and also dry out a flat in a city built to be damp.

A credit card fraud whodunnit

I have a credit card that I have used twice, both times in reputable online stores. I have no PIN number, I have not used it in a cashpoint, I have never handed it to someone. Somehow it's been accessed and used by a thief. My bank spotted the unusual transactions so there's no long-term harm but I'm left wondering which of the two companies leaked/lost/stole my details.

Dragon's Blood

I was surprised to learn that the world's hottest peppers are grown in the south of England, and that hot sauce is now a local delicacy on the south coast. While I was in Lyndhurst I bought a couple of locally produced sauces.

'Raging Ape' (I couldn't resist) is a spicer version of 'Cheeky Monkey' (also tempting) but is not particularly hot - it's a spicy banana chutney rather than a chili sauce. Nice on a cheese sandwich.

'Dragon's Blood', on the other hand, has been a rather moving experience (tears were involved) and very enjoyable. I suspect it's also mostly banana, but the Naga pepper in it makes things very interesting without it becoming a joke sauce - it's remarkably hot but also has a nice flavour, and the heat isn't harsh or unpleasant. Definitely recommended, but be cautious. Naga peppers are apparently used as anti-elephant tear gas.

Lens mold

One thing that has particularly bothered me about the mold problem is that my camera and small collection of lenses were stored in the chest of drawers that had a patch of mold at the bottom. I had dismissed the idea of mold in lenses until I found my battered 30-year old binoculars, stored in the damp storeroom in the old flat, with mold inside, and then read that mold etches the glass in a lens: if it gets in and grows then your lens is ruined. While we've been cleaning the flat I've been keeping my photography kit packed up in my backpack, and moving it from room to room.

After more research and talking with a rather helpful person in Calumet I think I may be worrying too much, as usual. There seems to be very little info on the web about lenses and mold, and that hopefully indicates that outside a few very humid countries it isn't usually a problem. Keeping old lenses in leather cases (as my binoculars were) is a known cause of lens mold. Some older lenses were made with parts that were biodegradable and considered tasty by mold. With modern lenses, stored relatively well and used occasionally, it shouldn't occur. I used to collect all the packets of silica gel that arrive with hardware and scatter them about near my camera. Just to be on the safe side I've bought two 500g bags of Silica gel from Fred Aldous.

I also need to get out with the camera more: sunlight kills mold spores.

Return of a mold enemy

Just before leaving to go on holiday we discovered a problem. Moving some bags of clothes stored against a bedroom wall revealed a splatter-pattern of yellow mildew. Pulling furniture away from the walls revealed the mold had spread across one entire wall, always out of sight, and had started spreading onto the two adjacent walls. Worse, my chest of drawers that stores t shirts and camera bits had been contaminated, with bright yellow patches inside towards the bottom, and invisible growth on the back with a strange and distinctive smell.

I should have guessed something was going on months ago - I'd sometimes noticed a faint smell like chalk dust, but put it down to the air filter we'd just bought, assuming that it was something to do with the filter, or stirred-up dust.

The brown hardboard backs of furniture seems strangely effected too - some had a strong chalky smell but no visible mold until it was cleaned, then darker spots would appear. The undersides of two IKEA HOL boxes were particularly bad.

The bed, made of pine, seems fine, but we ended up washing it anyway. The slats seems to have stained the underside of the no-turn mattress with a plank version of the Turin Shroud, but other than that it's fine.

I've been washing down surfaces with some tea-tree soap, then rinsing with diluted vinegar, drying it, then soaking with rather strong tea tree oil solution, and letting that soak in and dry gradually. I've been using a lot of tea tree oil (I'm hoping to avoid a known side effect of absorbing too much tea tree oil). We've had to start washing *all* our clothing, bed linen, etc, then drying it, then repacking it in cleaned areas. Doing that while trying to keep the flat dry isn't easy - it's going to take weeks. We've been dismantling furniture and leaving parts of it in sunlight, as I've heard that helps.

I've not sure why the problem has occurred - the bedroom isn't damp and was pretty clean and tidy, but I've got some ideas:

• We were storing a lot of items that were previously kept in the damp store room in the old flat, and were probably 'infected' there. The old cardboard box of traditional Mississippi swamp moss voodoo dolls didn't help - it was definitely moldy.
• Some areas of the room had furniture very close to the wall, and the mildew had particularly flourished in those areas. No normally visible area of wall had any mold at all.
• We were using an old non-HEPA Philips air purifier with a filter that had been used in the old flat. I think this may have helped distribute spores rather than absorb them (we couldn't find a new filter for it, and finally gave up and bought a new Bionaire purifier)
• The bedroom is usually cool, and the laminate floor gets rather cold. I think warm damp air from the lounge and kitchen was cooling and condensing in the bedroom and being absorbed, and feeding the items infected in the old flat.

The good news so far is that the mold is coming off OK, leaving little trace in most cases. Most of the chalky smell has gone, and the yellow marks it left on wooden areas is fading.

EEE!

Partly to reassure myself that I wouldn't be offline, just in case something happened at work, and partly because I've wanted a laptop since 1992, I gave in and bought an Eee from Microdirect before going away. I'd prefer a Mac, but since Apple don't make tiny £250 laptops that I can use occasionally without worrying too much, I went for the Eee 900. Much less battery power than the Eee 901 and no built-in bluetooth, but a tiny £8 dongle fixed half of that, and the cheaper price, faster CPU and better Linux compatibility was a plus.

The keyboard was horrible for the first day or so but I seem to have adapted to it. The default Xandros-derived OS isn't bad and would be great as a simple web-appliance (if has Firefox, Open Office, and Thunderbird, and can handle most everyday tasks quite well) but after a week I wanted to start fiddling about and installing more software, which simply isn't available packaged for the Eee's Linux. I've switched to using Eee Ubuntu and I'm very happy with it. Eee Ubuntu is not completely polished yet, and requires a few tweaks here and there, but it's a massive improvement. However, having a 4GB system partition and access to Ubuntu's rather large software collection does require a little more self-control than I'm used to.

If you're interested in getting an Eee be aware that there are different types of Eee 900: some apparent bargains lack the faster 4GB SSD.

The New Forest

About six months ago Arteth predicted that I'd be overdoing things at work during September, so she arranged a holiday for us starting as soon as possible after The Deadlines. This was definitely a good idea: we've just had a very pleasant holiday staying at The Barn in Ashurst, on the edge of the New Forest. Cosy building, comfortable rooms, and very good food. They'll cook up a different meal each day; I ended up eating and very much enjoying ingredients I wouldn't normally choose. I can't stand celery, but even their celery soup was marvelous.

The Barn is just a few minutes walk from the edge of the forest. About an hour after arriving we'd already found pigs and ponies roaming the forest (we had the good luck of going during 'pannage', a period each year when pigs are released into the forest to eat acorns that could otherwise poison the local semi-wild ponies). The forest itself is beautiful, a mix of managed woodland, heathland, bogs, and unspoiled small towns. It is not wild (the area has been managed for at least a thousand years) but I've never seen so much vitality in the UK before: plants and animals seemed much more alive, more colourful, larger. I'm used to ants being indifferent to my presence as I walk past but the New Forest ants I met had the unnerving habit of stopping and turning to look back at me. I have never seen so many insects (or so many spiders - they aren't short of food). I have also never seen such happy pigs. Most of them still end up 'going to market', but they seem to have a great time living as pigs should.

The Barn offers a discount if you arrive via public transport, which isn't a bad idea: Ashurst was surprisingly easy to reach using public transport from Manchester, and the area is pretty well covered by buses. You can walk all day then wait awhile and get the bus back.

The experience of walking in the New Forest was a surprise too. The Lake District is good for vigorous walks and photographing wide views. The New Forest is good for slow, meandering (when possibly a little lost...) walks, full of beautiful small scenes and opportunities for macro photography. The light in October was magical - throughout the day sunlight was coming in at a low angle, filtered through morning and evening mists and golden leaves. I learned that it's difficult to have a long, exploratory walk and also focus on macro photography - one involves moving, and one doesn't.

The area as a whole isn't great from a vegetarian/vegan perspective as there are few veggie restaurants and healthfood shops but if you base yourself at a veggie-friendly place serving evening meals, such as the Barn, then it's fine.

I made the mistake of leaving my tripod at home, which resulted in a large collection of blurred macro shots, but the decent photos are now up on Flickr as usual.