"What you need is combat experience. That's what keeps you alive in real combat."
"OK, but how can you tell the difference between combat experience and real combat?"
"Simple. If you're alive at the end, it was combat experience."
(From The Ballad of Halo Jones)

• My supervisor, who's been away in Barcelona for the last month, dropped in for a flying visit last weekend. We had two mammoth three-hour meetings in two days, which was excellent in that I now have lots of stuff to work on and some idea of how to fix up things that were broken, but utterly knackering. Momentum has been lost a bit (hence the Fine Structure stuff). Thesis currently stands at 64 pages.


• My office-mate Martin's stag night was on Saturday, which was good fun. It was the first stag night that almost all of us had been on, and it was fairly quiet - pub meal, trip to off-license to stock up for later, second pub, burger van, back to Gareth's flat for Wii games and more beer, argument with the jobsworth in the McDonald's drive-through who refused to serve us on the grounds that we weren't in a car, more Wii, decide at about 3am that I'm tired and should go home when I finish this drink, sit back in comfy sofa, look at watch again, discover to my horror that it's now 5.30am. One guy seemed determined to serve as our personal Bad Idea Bear, and kept making suggestions like "Let's play a drinking game!", or "let's all order drinks with stupid names!", or "let's get flaming sambucas!". The rest of us mostly kept him in check, though.
  
  My trouble is that I drink quickly - not just alcohol, any liquid - so even if I alternate alcohol and water I still take in quite a lot over the course of a long evening. And Martin kept palming his unwanted drinks off on me :-( Consequently, my head's was in less than wonderful state for most of Sunday. Hangovers get a lot worse as you get older, I've noticed.


• I've been doing more hillwalking. As of a few weeks ago (when Philipp and Bart and I did a moderately epic six-hill hike up by Glen Shee, in beautiful conditions), I have climbed a quarter of the 3000ft mountains in Scotland; as of Saturday, I've climbed all the hills in Sections 1 and 2 of Munro's Tables (out of, er, seventeen sections). Munro-count currently stands at 79 out of 284. Annoyingly, I've now done almost all the ones reachable by public transport, and I'm fast running out of hills that can be reached in a day from Glasgow.


• The rock-climbing's continuing to be fun. I went to the wall yesterday, and even with my hangover I was climbing stuff I couldn't have managed a few months ago, and I think my technique is getting better. I've got fairly good upper-body strength, so the temptation is to pull myself up the wall with my arms: this is apparently bad technique, as it tires you out faster than if you use your legs, so I'm trying to force myself to push up with my legs more. My other problem is that I don't anticipate enough: I'll get into a position and only then think about my next move, rather than planning two or three moves ahead. This is, again, much more tiring. Incidentally, I could never have anticipated how important balance is for climbing.
  
  The thing I like about climbing, I think, is how mentally absorbing it is: you're testing your mind and your body at the same time.


• wormwood_pearl came climbing with us on Thursday, and seemed to enjoy herself. Hopefully she'll come along more in the future. An attempt to interest her in hillwalking last year was a bit of a disaster: though the weather was fine on the actual day, it had been raining heavily the day before, and the ground was waterlogged, so walking through it was less than fun.


• I somehow managed to put my phone through the washing machine. Fortunately, I have an old Nokia 3310 kicking around to serve as a backup for just this eventuality, and most of my numbers were on the SIM card, which was undamaged; unfortunately, not all the numbers were. The upshot is, if you've given me your number in the last year, I probably don't have it any more.


• I bought a second-hand laptop from my flatmate Alan, who has a laptop problem in the way that other men have drinking or gambling problems. Poor old delirium's getting a bit battered, with her speakers failing to work half the time. And I had various bits of Windows-only software lying around that I wanted to be able to use, so acquiring a Windows machine seemed like a reasonable idea. And being able to reduce Alan's brokeness was a bonus, too. I've been running Linux predominantly since around 2002, and pretty much exclusively since 2004, so it's weird owning a Windows machine again in all sorts of ways. I've updated it, run malware scans, set secure passwords and created a non-admin account for everyday use, but it still feels rather like unprotected sex, only without the fun parts.


• If I'm being entirely honest with myself, though, the real reason I wanted a Windows machine was so I could play Portal, which (for those of you who don't already know) is a lovely 3D puzzle game in which you can shoot "portals" onto most flat surfaces, creating a teleporter between your two portals. There's an excellent trailer for the game, which gives you a good idea of the game mechanics; someone's also written a 2D Flash version. But the best thing about the game, I think, is the atmosphere, which is surprisingly creepy and effective. The occasional voiceovers from the insane HAL 9000-style computer are beautifully blackly comic.
  
  Sadly, Dream (I've stuck with the Sandman machine-naming convention) doesn't cope with it all that well: I've been getting audio stutter, and there seems to be a bug in the video driver which makes the machine bluescreen whenever I try to change the resolution. Upgrading the driver helped - it's stopped bluescreening when I Alt-Tab to another application :-) But Portal's coped a lot better than Half-Life 2, which appears to be missing half its textures: the game world's a semi-transparent mess of wireframes and magenta chessboards, which surely isn't intentional. I'll see if Google or the forums have any ideas. Edit: looks like this is a common problem. Possibly driver-related, but it looks like I should also verify my game cache files and possibly re-extract the game data.

• One of the unexpected difficulties of climbing Everest is the heat: even at the North Col, at over 7,000m, they were experiencing temperatures of 40C during the day (at sunset, it apparently drops to -20C in around half an hour).
• Losing weight on an Everest trip is a given, and losing 20-30lb is not unusual. Brian Blessed, who usually weighs about 16st/220lb/100kg, and dropped to about 14 in the course of his training, was down to nearer 10st/140lb/65kg on his return!
• You have to be awesomely fit. Blessed claims to have been running "10-14 miles a day, with the odd marathon thrown in for good measure". Even allowing for a bit of dramatic exaggeration (he is an actor), that's pretty impressive.
• Getting ready to go in the morning at altitude takes ages - ice needs to be melted and boiled for tea, tricky high-altitude gear needs to be put on with fingers made clumsy by cold, and the altitude makes your brain slow and befuddled. On their final day of climbing, it took them nearly five hours to make a start. "Nice to know it's not just me", I thought. But I have a question for the physicist-mountaineers out there: why does water take longer to boil at altitude? Water boils at a lower temperature, so it should be quicker. Is it that it needs to be melted from ice first? Or is it that there's less oxygen around for combustion? If the latter, it should be possible to solve it - the problem of creating high temperatures using chemical reactions at high altitude and with minimal danger and weight penalty has received substantial attention, but I can't find anything about this by Googling. Am I missing something?
• Shortly before he has to turn back, Blessed sees a hallucination (or vision, if you will) of all the members of the twenties expeditions, sitting on the snow in their shorts, smiling and waving at him. I rather like the idea of the ghosts of all the early mountaineers living together on Everest, able to enjoy the beauty of the mountains but not to be touched by the conditions.

wormwood_pearl

susoeffl

wormwood_pearl

"We could have a Sartre night, where you have to prove that your food exists before you can eat it!"
"Yeah, or a Dylan Thomas night, with liver and eighteen straight whiskies!"