Calum Andrew Morrell

Let there be light!

My eyesight is becoming worse as I progress all too rapidly into my fifth decade on this planet. If the light isn't good enough I won't be reading, writing or using a computer.

My home office is a south facing room, which means the light is either non-existent or intensely strong, depending on the weather. There is rarely a comfortable in-between. Furthermore, whoever designed this house decided that long narrow rooms with a single overhead light near the window was a great idea. This means that no matter what the weather is like, I almost always have to ensure additional lighting is turned on.

It's (way past) time to start considering additional task and mood lighting to allow more control over how I can use the space.

Should I write about dice? I'll toss a coin...

Ah yes, dice. Over the past few years I have acquired a selection of dice, ranging from cheap plastic blobs to precision crafted hunks of metal. I'm talking about sets of dice with 4, 6, 8 ... 20 sides and such, used predominantly for role playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. I love my Paladin Roleplaying set in its foam protected metal tin.

Through extended use I've been noticing that some dice appear to be less random than others. Should 4 appear far more often than any other number on one D6 than the others, for example. A quick search suggests this is a well known problem, affecting some dice more than others, though I remain unconvinced that floating a dice in insanely salty water and tapping it a few times is likely to prove anything about randomness.

If I wanted to prove randomnicity (yes, that is actually a term) of even a single dice I would need to roll it more times than my arm wants to consider. For even a simple two-sided coin, a hundred tosses is insufficient to establish an approximate 50/50 chance - think how many times you'd need to throw a D20 to confirm whether each face had a 1 in 20 chance of landing upright! My arm hurts merely pondering this.

What have I been reading?

Not a lot lately. A migraine, or series of migraines, have been plaguing me over the past month. As a result I have been reading little and not often, which is immensely frustrating.

• David Lasocki & Robert Ehrlich, The Recorder, Yale.
• David Eddings, The Sapphire Rose, Harper Voyager.

What have I been writing?

For the same migrainous reasons as above, very little. Beside this here status update and the most recent articles on fountain pens and correcting an error I made in an article I wrote a couple of years ago, I have been working on an article about product roadmaps and another on life with budgies.

I have also been collating notes and writing samples I had previously produced for a story idea I had a few years ago. I intend to begin writing it in earnest moderately soon.

What have I been watching?

I had rewatched the Ring trilogy before my migraine(s) began. That's the excellent Japanese original horror films by Hideo Nakata and not the rather tedious Hollywood remakes.

Since the migraine(s) began I rarely do more than semi-watch anything, by which I mean eyes closed and listening with the occasional peek as required. As such, nothing of worth has been viewed, sticking to easy binges such as the first season of ER and Poirot (with David Suchet).

What have I been listening to?

An almost daily staple is BBC Radio 3 at whatever point in the morning, afternoon or evening I feel the need. For those of you not familiar with UK radio, this is a mostly classical music station. Besides this I have been slowly introducing my two new(ish) budgies to a range of classical, opera, jazz, rock and metal to gauge their reactions. Vega in particular is especially vocal if he does not enjoy something. Thankfully the range of music they enjoy, or at least tolerate, is quite broad.

I've been catching up on the past few weeks of Around Midnight, a jazz program on BBC Radio 3 from 11:30pm to 12:30am each weekday, presented by the saxophonist Soweto Kinch. He brings a wonderful blend of classic and current jazz with additional selections by weekly guests.

-- Mar sin leat an dràsta