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On the way back from lunch today, the elevator in GP South got stuck somewhere near the third floor. It jolted to a halt, and the recorded voice told us, in a very soothing tone, that You are experiencing minor technical difficulties. Actually, I thought, it’s you who’s experiencing minor technical difficulties – we’re just stuck. After the control software rebooted, or whatever it is it does to right itself, we were soon on our way again. Thank goodness for that, because with seven people in the elevator, it could soon have gotten very uncomfortable!

Below are the temperature forecasts for the places we’ll be visiting in France, Belgium and Holland. Each forecast is for the first day on which we’ll be in a particular city/province. The temperatures, except for those of Paris, are the average temperatures for the relevant day of the year. Given that temperatures this year appear to be about five or six degrees below average, I think some of these figures need to be adjusted downwards. I have warm clothes, but I think I’m going to need even warmer ones!

The current temperature in Paris is 3°C with an overnight low of -3°C. It is forecast to snow.

For some tasks, it is easiest to revert to Microsoft software. I have found MS Powerpoint to be the easiest way to create nice looking diagrams and figures. The trouble is, if you are writing in Latex, you need some way to convert those figures to EPS format. The way I used to do this was to save my figures in Powerpoint as an uncompressed image type (say BMP), and then use the GIMP to convert to EPS. The problem is, this results in grubby images. I tried using ImageMagick instead, but the EPS it outputs cannot be interpreted by the Latex tools or eps2eps. So, what to do?

In producing her thesis, Karen figured out that the best way to generate EPS files from graphics generated on the Windows platform is to save your images as WMF (Windows Metafiles) and then use WMF2EPS to convert to EPS. WMF2EPS is a shareware Windows utility. The EPS files it produces are several orders of magnitude clearer and crisper than any other method I’ve tried. One method I didn’t try, which might produce similarly crisp images, is to print the image to a file and then use the ps2epsi Linux utility. Another option is to create PDF images and then use pdflatex instead of the regular Latex and DVI tools. I will continue to experiment with these alternatives in the future.

I submitted my thesis at 5pm yesterday afternoon, in keeping with the long-established tradition of submitting in the final hour of the working week. So it’s done, at last. Now I just have to wait for the examiners’ comments, which could take anywhere from two months to a year to arrive.

Bill Gates has received an honorary knighthood from the Queen for his sizeable charity donations and the work that his and Melinda Gate’s charity, The Gates Foundation, has done towards reducing poverty and developing a vaccine for HIV.

Ben has changed his blog template again, this time opting for an understated look.

Jim must be recovering after a cold winter in France. He’s obviously missing the sunburnt country a little bit. If only we could take a piece of it over to him…

My brother and I saw House of Flying Daggers at Indooroopilly yesterday. There’s no question that the film was beautifully photographed. Colour played an important role in the movie; the characters tended to ride around on horses quite a bit, and I think the colours of the leaves on the ground and the colours of the tree trunks were supposed to help you figure out where and how far separated the characters were at any given time. Some of the scenes were obviously quite painstakingly composed, perhaps even pretentiously so. Still, the cinematography was among the best I’ve seen in any movie.

However, something was missing from this film, and I think it might well have been the plot. Granted, the writers tried to use twists and surprises to keep the story interesting, but these twists were verging on the ridiculous. It was too easy to come to the conclusion that these plot devices were used for their own sake rather than because they added something significant to the movie. Furthermore, one particular turn in the plot seemed to render one of the more beautiful scenes earlier in the movie completely irrelevant.

Another disappointment was the use of fantasy martial arts of a kind whose execution had not progressed any further than preceding movies of the same genre, notably Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. It was amusing to see the speed with which the soldiers were able to craft sharp stakes out of the bamboo trees through which they were simultaneously running/flying. Moreover, in these kinds of films, the audience can be expected to suspend disbelief only so far. The mark was well and truly overstepped when the flying daggers began to take on heat-seeking or laser-guided properties of which Raytheon would be proud.

The acting was not too bad. Zhang Ziyi, who co-starred in Crouching Tiger and appeared in Hero did a convincing job as a blind assassin. However, she was less convincing in the romantic sub-plot. But perhaps that, again, was the fault of the writers: the characters were soulless.

There was so much wrong with this movie, and yet, it was so incredibly beautiful that one can almost forgive its shortcomings.

When I started reading The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, I said that it was well written and that from the very beginning the reader has a sense of where the book is going. Unfortunately, the book became a little bit too predictable for my liking. Almost every chapter followed the same formula; only the country or continent in question changes. In each chapter, the failings of the mixed economy or communism as it was implemented in a particular region of the world were brought to light, and then the region’s turbulent swing to the free market was examined. The answer to the "where to from here" type question posed in the final chapter could have been dealt with a little more comprehensively. Nevertheless, it remains an excellent book, and one that I am very glad I read.

Yesterday, I bought myself The Filmmaker’s Handbook using the Dymocks voucher Nigel gave me for my birthday. It’s something just a little bit different to read, and a little bit more formal than the "10 Minute Film School" at the back of Rebel Without a Crew (a book I purchased some time ago). Unfortunately, it’s a little bit too big to take to France.

I think I shall turn back to Hardy for reading material in the form of The Hand of Ethelberta. It ought to make good reading for the upcoming trip.

I went with Karen and her parents to Lamington National Park on Saturday.

Karen snapped this great picture of a Lamington Spiny Crayfish at Elabana Falls. More pictures here.