I just called our local Indian takeaway to order some yummy Friday night food. At the end of the phone call, when I gave my name, the guy at the other end of the phone stopped me and asked if I’d ordered a meal from them on 3rd September.

I was slightly bewildered and couldn’t remember. But on mention of a missing keema nan it all came flooding back.

A few weeks back (apparently on 3rd September), we ordered and collected an Indian takeaway. On getting it home I was rather distressed to find that it was missing from the paper bag. I recovered though and, ultimately, forgot about it.

Until tonight when the lovely man at the Pipasa remembered my name (and, probably, my identical order!) and told me that he wasn’t going to charge me for my keema nan this time.

How good is that for customer service? )

I recently had to complete a CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) form. Today, I got it back again with a query about my name.

Now, my surname is, as you probably know or have guessed, Cowen. This is my family’s surname and the name I received at birth. I’ve never had a different surname.

In Section C of the CRB form, Line 20 provides a box labelled Surname at birth (if different). It’s that bit in parentheses that’s important here:”if different”. My surname at birth is, as I said, not different from the surname I gave as my name. So I left that box blank.

My ‘mistake’, apparently was that, in Section A Line 1, I selected Ms as my title for the innocent reason that I don’t like to be called Miss (I find it unnecessary to tell people that I’m unmarried or to give the impression that I’m a 10-year-old girl). By selecting Ms, however, I could be hiding the fact that I am, or have been, actually married and, thus, who knows what my surname at birth was.

Despite the fact that I’ve signed the form to say that it contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And the fact that it asks me only to provide my surname at birth (IF DIFFERENT)!

I think you get the idea that I’m a touch annoyed by all this. The upshot of it all is that the charity for whom I’m getting the CRB check done has had to send me the form back by recorded delivery so that I can fill in a box that I correctly didn’t fill in the first time. Anyway, I’ve written my surname at birth in Line C20 as requested and as if it didn’t say “(if different)”. And now I’ve to return the form to the charity so that they can post it back to the CRB agency.

The other recent event that impelled me to start my internal blog was last week’s Extreme Blue European Expo at Hursley. Extreme Blue is a student internship program that IBM runs every summer. It lasts 12 weeks. The projects are proposed by IBMers but are implemented by students. The Expos are held in different locations each year, I think, but this year the European one was held in Hursley, UK.

I’d heard a bit about the Hursley-based SiSi project from a friend who was mentoring the team, so I moseyed on down to Hursley House and spent a good hour-and-a-half visiting the Expo stands and hearing about those and other projects from around IBM sites in Europe.

I’ve been learning British Sign Language (BSL) for about a year and, having learnt just the basics about how to communicate in BSL (that is, it’s not just hand signs or fingerspelling but also facial expressions, lip shapes, and the spatial location of the signs that matter), I couldn’t imagine how an avatar could convincingly sign – especially not translated in real time from speech, which is what the SiSi project aimed to do.

The SiSi team’s demo blew me away. They use a third-party piece of software to convert speech input to text. The text is then sent to the client machine (I think) where an avatar signs the text in BSL or American Sign Language (ASL), depending on the language you selected. I can’t remember any more of the technical details than that but the demo text they tried was translated to BSL at a reasonable speed, I thought (probably as fast as a human interpreter). The demo was on a local system but the students reckoned it did okay over remote systems.

The project was done with the University of East Anglia and the RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf people) who supplied the database of signs (which I guess is probably a database of video clips and associated labels). I’m not sure who marked up the signs in Sign Language Markup Language (SLML), a form of XML, but I expect that’s the most intensive part of it.

The great thing for IBM and the Extreme Blue scheme is that, like last year’s LAMA project the SiSi project has attracted loads of press coverage, here and around the world.

SiSi aside, there were loads of other cool projects including (you can probably spot a theme in my interests here!) the Accessibility in Virtual Worlds project. For a change, the virtual world concerned was not Second Life but, instead, Active Worlds. Active Worlds enabled the project team to devise a way to mark up objects around the world using XML so that blind people can walk through the virtual worlds using sonar. The user wears headphones (or has speakers set up) and the nearer something is, I think, the louder the sound (or something like that).

I came away from the Expo with a handful of really professional-looking Moo cards and leaflets from the stands I had time to visit. I think the most amazing thing that occurred to me about the Expo was the amount and quality of work that the students were able to produce in just 12 weeks.

Tony just found this gross but ace site: whatjeffkilled.com

It especially appealed to me because Bailey, our ginger killer-cat, brought in the first mouse in ages tonight. He managed to throw off his latest collar (and bell) a few days ago so he’s now silent and deadly. He came into the house meowing out the side of his mouth because the rest of his mouth was stuffed with dead mouse. He came into the living-room and dropped it on the carpet to admire for a while.

He was most put out when I removed the mouse and dumped it in the outside bin. He sulked for a while, then stalked off outside again.

The closest we came to a blog was the CatTails wiki page that Tony started when Gizmo and Bailey were kittens. We used to keep it up to date with all the kills and crap that they brought in. Their count is way too numerous nowadays, though.

While not the most gross (though yucky and messy), the magpie to the right is the most bizarre. He wasn’t small and our kittens (at the time) were. We can only imagine that one of them (Bailey?) had managed to catch it and drag it through the cat-flap (no other way in) then been scared off by a massive flapping vicious magpie. Tony sums up the story nicely on his blog.

I love my cats.

A couple of years back, a friend from work was doing an AS level in photography in her spare time and was given a piece of coursework to complete over Easter. So she figured it’d be a good chance to have a girlie day out and we (me and some other work friends) could be her models.At first we were slightly apprehensive about exactly what we would be modelling… But she soon put our minds at rest and said we’d be going up to Avebury standing stones for the day to pretend to be fantasy warrior characters a la Lord of the Rings etc.

So one windy Sundy in April, Katja, Tess, me, and Keren (as shown in the piccie to the right) dug through the supplied sack of costumes to create ourselves as characters for the photoshoot. We spent much of the day running around fields with plastic swords (or, in my case, the extremely sharp dagger that you can see in the photo).

We had a great time but as the day went on, we got more and more tired and cold, which probably added some authenticity to the scenes.

The best of the photos are tagged avebury on Flickr. My friend passed her assessment and we all went along to the exhibition and felt just a little bit important as we wandered around and admired ourselves on display.

p.s. And while we’re on the subject, I quite like this one, which isn’t tagged as avebury but is the result of my friend more recently playing with her graphics package. I like the soft-focus, air-brushed effect.