It has been an interesting couple of weeks, training wise. Life on the weird front has been largely intro- and retrospective. Interesting to look back at how things have moved on. But I’ll deal with that elsewhere later. I have some interesting thoughts on why Loki may be a shifter par excellence but he ain’t got my Old Man beat by any stretch of the imagination — and this has implications for old One Eye as well.

They’re not just my Uncles, after all.

But I will note that the Peanut Gallery has become quite involved with the physical side of life again since I moved. They’d pretty much left me to get on with it while I was in Devon, trusting me to make my own decisions as the physical work of cycling to work was enough. Now that I’m up here and driving to work the tech team — and by inference the PG — are being much more proactive.

So, boys and girls, this week I have mostly been learning to run on narrow, twisty, uneven, stony paths. Apparently this is something to do with body-space awareness. I was alright until this involved running over a rocky mound and straight down onto a plank over a stream with a fair drop on either side.

“Run? Over that? Me? You’ve got to be fucking…. Waaaaah!”

I don’t think I’m going to manage a Super Randonneur series this year. Which is a shame. I wanted to do that, but I need to get my saddle sorted out and I can’t do that until the house has sold and my bank account is no longer blaring a high-level alarm every time I buy tea bags (or anything else for that matter).

I did put my Audax sticker on Shackleton, though.

A reasonably good time was had by all. It was smaller, friendlier, less hectic, less stressful and generally nicer than the big National one. In my opinion, anyway, and I’m always right.

Thanks to the silly little rune reading man who thought my tattoo was a serpent and broken spear:

“I’ve never seen a serpent and broken spear like that before.”

“It’s a double disc and z-rod.”

“They don’t look like that.”

“This one does. It is from Norrie’s Plaque. It was found on a silver lozenge at Windygates on the back of Largo law.”

“Oh. I wondered why it looked familiar…”

He also opined that I should have had my bindrune barcode done in blue and gold. I didn’t know you could get tattoo inks in gold.

Surprisingly (I mean that in a good way) good to see Sally and Mad Mick and John and Karen and Kitty and even my stalker, Pete Jennings.

OK. So it probably is just coincidence that he’s at every damn conference I go to. But he is at every damn conference I go to. I went to his talk on Practical Runes this time, but it was really aimed more at complete beginners. Plus I got the distinct impression he was either holding back and hiding it, or being funnelled into a particular method of working and perceiving them.

Still. He and I share the same opinion of Ralph Blum, so that’s okay.

When did everyone move to Fife and the surrounding area? I had no idea that Mick was just down the road from me. It was nice seeing people again. Being able to talk to them face to face. Have an actual conversation with actual people about actual weird shit. I hadn’t really realised how isolated I had become. How much of an outsider. I’d started getting reluctant to talk to people because I can’t talk to anyone about weird shit any more without someone from the PG getting a word in and I have a tendency to lose friends before they get as far as becoming friends.

This weekend was no exception, but Sally, I think (hope) is one of those who can see past that and not take it personally.

Although I did think it was a bit rough to bring her nephew along for his introduction to paganism and introduce him to me.

I think the talk on the psychology of the witch hunters was probably quite good but it was after lunch and it was dark and warm in there so I fell asleep. I was on best behaviour and I think I managed not to offend anyone. So that was good.

Think the shorter cloak looked better, though Gac. The Spring-Heeled Jack look suited you.

For the full report of the Round the Forth Cycle Challenge, venture forth and take yourself to The Club. Take your shoes off before you go in, though. We’ve just cleaned the carpets after the latest spambot attack.

All in all a pretty good day: nice to have a cycle ride with Frood that someone else had organised. Made me hanker after Critical Massing the Forth Bridge again. Not that it would make much difference with the congestion the toll plaza replacement is causing.

Bloody hurt today though. My shoulders have frozen up completely with muscling Shackleton up that hill out of Bo’ness.

As I was saying yesterday about the spawn of Bill Gates’s loins…

Today I have spent a good couple of hours wrestling with Excel. The problem is simple: I have to produce around 90 letters requiring the same address to be displayed in 3 places, and a few other bits of standard but variable text (e.g. date received). The obvious solution is the mail merge.

The names and addresses on these letters also have to be recorded on a spreadsheet. It seems silly, even downright ridiculous for me to type in all these addresses only for someone else to type them in again. Unfortunately the format of the recording spreadsheet is such that the whole address is in one cell, and my mail merge has each line of the address in a different cell for formatting reasons.

Luckily Excel 2003 has a couple of methods of merging cells, including the CONCATENATE function. I didn’t use this, preferring to use the =A2&” “&B2; version.

Unfortunately, when I went into the cell to edit a tiny error in the formula, the cell ceased displaying the results of the formula and displayed the formula itself instead. Turning the formula auditor on it told me only that the contents of the cell were a constant.

Excel had ceased recognising the formula as a formula.

Googling this error didn’t turn up much, although I did find this, which suggested there is a limit on the number of cell references Excel can handle. I didn’t buy this. Not in this instance. I only have 40 rows.

For those of you who are caught in the same dilemma, please check the formatting setting on your cells. Mine had mysteriously been set to text, which did not take effect until I edited the formula. I can only assume this was the cause of the problem as setting the cell formatting to general resolved it and my cells are displaying lovely addresses again.

My brain is somewhat fried right now.

Every so often I get a ticket that opens up so much fun stuff that it’s impossible to resist the temptation to hang on to the open line once the chit’s been signed off.

I know I shouldn’t. But it’s like kipple. Even though I know it’s a bad idea and I’ll regret it later I can’t help myself.

So now I get to go to the PF con with a semi-fried brain and boy are the PG gonna have fun with that one.

A long time ago there was a programme called Microsoft Office Word, and lo, whilst its name was spat upon by the legions of warriors in the rebel alliance of Apple Mac and Linux, the workers of the Empire did suffer under its yoke and eventually learn how first to use and then to abuse it. After many years of endeavour the workers of the Empire learned how to make Word do what they wanted, and for some time things were peaceful.

And then Microsoft revealed once more the teeth of its predatory nature, and the abusive side of its rule, and did announce an Evolution. Lo, did Bill Gates and all his little devils bring out Microsoft Office 2003.

And the people wept.

I had, for the record, become relatively proficient with the old Office 97 suite. I can’t programme in Visual Basic (although I suspect I’m going to have to learn), but I can hash a macro together given an afternoon with no distractions.

I used to be able to do this thing where you make a document that prompts the user to enter information. So you’d have a letter, say, and open it, and a series of dialogue boxes would appear asking for the recipient’s name, address and stuff like that. It wasn’t that hard.

Apparently it’s not possible to do this any more. There are only three field types allowed in forms that are not to be part of a mail merge. Those three do not include the “ASK” field, which is the one I need if I don’t want to have to type the same address 4 times, given that there is no option for adding a bookmark reference to a Fill-in field.

It has taken me 2 hours to work out why I couldn’t make this work properly.

And lo there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and the workers did curse and spit upon the shadow of Bill Gates and all his little devils.

From the language use, particularly the punctuation, not to mention having an entire series of perfumes called ‘metamorphosis’ and a love of all smells called “green”, I have a sneaking suspicion that cb might just be one of ours.

The weather forecast isn’t great for Sunday’s Round the Forth. I’d prefer a lighter wind, but it looks like it’s due to be dry, anyway. Frood and I will both be there: he’ll be on Ivanhoe, the Dawes galaxy. I’ll have Shackleton the Pompino fixie.

The info came through for the Lepra Edinburgh – St Andrews. Not looking forward to the 1:11 (or did I dream the gradient?) Cleish Hill on a 70″ fixed, especially having read the warning about it getting very steep and winding on the descent. But it’ll be a hoot. And I’ll definitely deserve beer and ice cream after that. Probably some of the new Ben & Jerry’s Fossil Fuel, which is much nicer than it really ought to be. And has dinnossorrusses in it.

I just received an email from Chris Brosius.

He has a similar kind of synaesthesia to me, and he understood the barmy madness I wrote about his perfumes. So now there’s someone I can talk to about scent in the way I sense it, even if it’s not quite the same. He at least designs his perfumes from a topographical framework, so we can work on it.

He has recommended me one of his scents based on my (get this) colour and shape description of what I’m looking for. I can’t begin to describe how excited this makes me. It’s like having lived in a foreign country for years and years and then turning a corner one day and unexpectedly coming across someone who speaks a dialect of my native tongue and remembers what the weather is like in my native land in the springtime.

It’s such a difference from the girl in Boots in Exeter on Saturday, who insisted that the Dolce & Gabanna Light Blue was perfect. When I recoiled in horror from this overpowering, sickly, sparkling pink citrus scent that was like fake pink grapefruit flavour laced with sparkles, and had a shape like the way tinsel feels when one crushes it in a bare hand, this girl insisted it wasn’t strong and argued with me about how much citrus there is in it.

Time to give up on ordinary perfumes — and more particularly the people who sell them — once and for all. Boo-yah.

And Black March still rocks my boat.

This quiz I like.

Although these aren’t the guys I usually play.