Mufti for Hyderabad and Hanley

It's the last Saturday afternoon of 2007, and I am perusing my wardrobe for a set of apparel that will do me for standing on Hanley Bus Station at midnight tonight, and still be practicable garb for the streets of Hyderabad in a few days time. It'll get lounged in at a couple of airports on the way, and probably discarded well before I get to Kathmandu in a fortnight or so. Hmmm. That's the thing about the ubiquitous 'jeans and a t-shirt'. It sort of works OK everywhere... mostly.

I've been wandering about for months in a brilliant heavy woollen jacket that I bought in the market in Murmansk this summer. While wearing it, the mildest burst of exercise brings one out in a serious sweat. It's clearly fine for Russian winters, and works well for British ones too. But certainly not the overmantle for Bangalore. I'll travel light and look for something there, if necessary.

OK, this is an insight into how much planning has gone in to this next two weeks: I've got a set of maps I bought on Amazon, enough bought-online tickets to get me by bus to Heathrow tonight and by plane to Cochin via Bahrain tomorrow, one rucksack of the remaining clean jeans and t-shirts from a Matalan binge this summer, and my rather battered leather Indiana Jones hat. That's about it. A few bits and bobs like a trusty Coleman petrol stove; a water purefier, a Russian leatherman one-piece toolkit, and a camera. We're off to Katmandu on an autorickshaw...

Tangrams, titles and tantrums

I've been herding cats this last few weeks. The challenge has been to get 15 households to agree the joint purchase of a large adjoining plot of land, so that it can subsequently be divided up agreeably between them.

There was no way that the vendor was going to tackle 15 separate sets of negotiations and conveyances, so we formed a company to make the single purchase outright, and will then, post-purchase, divide the land equitably between the shareholders.

I would like to think that we are on the home straight now... and it feels like it's been a great way of cementing relationships between neighbours. We've had no tantrums, we've agreed generally how we ought to re-apportion the title, and I can now see a point in mastering the ancient Chinese art of tangrams - it helps you slice up complicated shapes into smaller complicated shapes!

It's fifteen years since I served my time in the classroom, but the old adage about managing meetings (or classes) still holds... you're really managing three strands concurrently - the time, the content, and the emotion. Can you reach consensus before the bell rings?

All's well so far. Once we exchange contracts, it'll feel like End of Term. Once we complete, it'll feel like Graduation. And once we're banging fenceposts in... then I hope will feel like getting that first paycheck. Fingers crossed...

Sub judice - no comment

I would love to comment, but it seems that when something is sub judice, then to comment would be inviting contempt of court. Suffice to say that when our office got broken into earlier this week, it presented a bit of an enigma. The weirdest choice of stuff was taken... and similarly weird choice of very nickable stuff was ignored and left. Can't help wondering what that was about... But it did remind me of a situation many years ago when we got broken into once, at home. The miscreant in this case had recently escaped from an institution, and was clearly so institutionalised that he tidied up behind him... well, sort of... He'd sat on the sofa and peeled an orange... then hidden the resulting orange peel inside my mother's copper kettle. He'd broken a window pane on the back door, to get in... then he'd carefully swept up the broken glass, and hidden it inside the washing machine. (My mother only found it the day after, when her washing load started to make a strange scraping noise when it went around!) Anyway, the fugitive had then phoned his Gran up in Glasgow. (A check of the last number dialled returned that gem.) The boys in blue then just phoned up the McBoys in Tartan, whoduly staked out the station in Glasgow, and 'abracadabra', the suspect stepped off the next train there and into their waiting handcuffs, it seems. Best of all, the loose change had fallen out of his pockets when sitting on our sofa, and dropped down behind the cushions. So, overall, he made a net loss on his burglary. Clearly, advanced burglary skills take a bit of acquiring, and neither of these culprits had got their Jemmy and Swag sack badge at Boy Scouts. Best I can say, on the record, in the circumstances, then, is

No comment

Beauty in the eye of the beholder

I've been messing about with a Munga Jeep today, preparing it for its forthcoming MoT test. I rewired the lights, and fixed the petrol gauge sender unit. The gameplan is to drive it to Mongolia next summer, so it sort of helps (a) if things work and (b) that you know how to fix them if and when they don't.

I can't really decide if it's beautiful or ugly. You see, it's both. It's boxy and square and very very basic. But actually those are really great virtues... it was built in the 1960s as a general purpose Eastern Bloc military vehicle... so it would get a bit of a battering and some heavy handling from everyday soldiers. It has shackles on it that are there so you can pop a parachute on it and drop it out of a plane. Most chunks of it seem designed so that they can be mended or adjusted with a big hammer and some baler twine (the agricultural equivalent of Gaffer Tape). I do have a huge manual for it, (one in German and one in English), but most things are so obvious I haven't had to consult them.

As it happens, I also recently started running a much more modern Jeep Cherokee. Last week a mysterious warning light came on, on the dashboard. Sorting out precisely what's causing the fault, and whether it's a genuine fault or just a fault of the fault reporting has been a nightmare. I've spent hours tracing cables and checking hoses all of which are incredibly inaccesible, and mostly unmentioned in the manual. A week later and I'm still not much nearer with diagnosing it.

Maybe these sorts of vehicles are like babies. If they are your own and you understand all their idiosyncracies, then they are beautiful. If they are someone else's, then they are ugly and messy and unpredictable and noisy. Objectivity...? Pah...!

Reaching out for the Event Horizon

Smug, or what, eh? Talk about pushing one's boundaries, but today I decided I would tackle the Event Horizon.

I run a website that collates a fairly large calendar of events. Of course, in the interests of keeping one's audience happy, one tries to make the calendar stretch as far forward into the future as possible, and have a decent spread of events from each region, and a good balance related to each of the website's different topics.

So, I needed a way of monitoring which areas were getting a bit thin (so we could focus our event-gathering activities to redress this). Well, superficially, that's easy... just look in the database for how far ahead the events reach... you might think?

Well, NO. You see, the dates of things like Trade Shows, Mother's Day and Christmas (is there a difference?) and even ITLAP Day and the like, are known long into the future. They are right out on the thin end of the tail of the normal distribution of dates you know or can easily find out about. And stuff that's going to happen in the next few weeks... well, if it's well publicised, that's easy to collate as well. So, how does one easily judge how much of the in-between stuff one has? Just how much vision of future events does one's web calendar have?

I dusted off my statistics and sampling notes, and had a play with some maths.

Really, when collecting events for my calendar, I've just sampled a subset of all the actual events that are out there in the real world. If I plotted how many of them are known for each day, I'd get a normal distribution curve... and a good way of measuring the spread of such a curve is its Standard Deviation (SD). Now, my distant memory of statistics and probability tells me that 95% of the variation is held within 1.96 SDs of the mean. And armed with that simple method, I can now calculate my Event Horizon... Within what span do I believe 95% of my events fall?

• Business Management : 06 December 2007
• Crops & Grassland : 30 November 2007
• Environment : 30 November 2007
• Equine : 02 November 2007
• Equipment : 02 January 2008
• Food & Drink : 28 November 2007
• Horticulture : 14 November 2007
• Livestock Enterprises : 04 December 2007
• Renewable Energy : 04 December 2007
• Soils & Water : 04 December 2007
• Tourism and Recreation : 16 November 2007
• Veterinary : 02 November 2007

So, it looks like my forward vision for bunny-cuddling and pony-prancing shebangs is fading. Cool. I'll put on my puffa jacket and phone Rolf Harris...