Misc social

[liv]

1. Coming bank holiday weekend. I'm planning to be in Cambridge and specifically at the last day of the Beer Festival on Saturday. Who else is going to be there? I may be free Sunday evening or Monday, if anyone wants to get together?
   
   
2. 14^th-16^th June: I'm returning from travels with jack late on Thursday evening 13^th. Would anyone like to see us either in London or Cambridge on the Friday or, more likely, during the weekend? If people can offer crash space in London Thursday night and hang out on Friday that would be perfect, but most likely we'll end up heading back to Cambridge to recover from travelling.
   
   
3. The first crop of doctorlings whom I've personally taught are graduating in July. This is slightly terrifying, knowing that kids I remember as callow second years are going to be actual doctors in just a few weeks! Anyway, the Medical School have very kindly invited me to represent the school in the formal academic procession. This is the first opportunity I've had to wear my PhD gown in a professional capacity (first academic dress occasion since my own graduation).
   
   Although they've changed this now, when I graduated Scottish universities mostly didn't have caps, so I have to process bare-headed. pseudomonas came up with the brilliant suggestion that I could make up for this by getting hair-falls. Dundee colours are black and something called "Stewart blue" which is basically as near to royal / liturgical blue as they could get away with without actually being royalty or the Virgin Mary. I am really struggling to translate the official British Colour Council code (BCC149) into a modern digital code, but it's something close to #002266. And a secondary colour of eggshell blue which is approx #0088ff. Does anyone who knows heraldry or any relevant aspect of formal colour stuff know how to get a more precise identification? And does anyone have any recs for where I might order hair-falls in my academic colours?
   
   
4. jack got a new shiny phone, so I have remembered that I used to play Draw Something a lot. If anyone wants to play, please add me (username ewerb).
   
   My own contract isn't up for a couple of months yet, but I am starting to think of what I want to do. Most probably buy a phone outright and then get a cheap, SIM-only contract rather than spreading the cost of the phone over the monthly payments. I really like my HTC Desire Z with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard and full-sized screen, but it's getting old and tired and nobody makes phones like that any more. So what do people recommend? I think I probably don't want to spend much over £200 on a phone. I want a decent amount of screen real-estate, and am leaning towards continuing with Android OS even though evil Google is evil argh. I want a phone that is a powerful handheld computer, mainly for internet, but don't much care if it's also a music player and camera.
   
   Cursory glance at what's available: the high-end Samsung phones are really nice but probably out of my price-range. I can get an HTC Desire X for £200 and it looks pretty solid if not ultra-fancy, or the Google Nexus 4 for more like £240; currently I lean towards the HTC, but I could be convinced. I wandered into a phone shop today to handle a few of the phones I'd been looking at on the internet and the salesman reckoned the best thing at my price-point was the Sony Xperia T. That's the "James Bond phone", which is kind of an anti-rec for me, but in terms of bang for buck it seems to compare reasonably well to the other two models I was considering. Having handled it I like the physical phone better than the Nexus, but the display is less shiny.
   
   
5. And talking of shiny tech, I've managed to score one of the £29 fire-sale Nooks. I still prefer the older generation Sony ereaders, but the recent ones are all touch-screen and nothing made in 2009 is really still usable today. If I have to have a touch-screen e-reader, I'd rather have the cheap Nook than something with a similar feature set at twice the price.

Comments

[kake]

I can offer our spare room on Thursday 13th, but not much hanging-out on Friday 14th as I'll probably need to spend it either working or at the library. (But I won't be at all offended if you want to take the spare room anyway and then dash off to hang out with other Londoners.)

[liv]

Thank you, that's a really sweet offer. I think I'd rather see people than just borrow a spare room; I didn't really imagine most people would be free on Friday but it seemed worth a try.

[kake]

Oh sure, I was just thinking that you might have some friends who wanted to see you in London on Friday but couldn't offer you a place to sleep on Thursday night. It's possible that I'll be available on the Friday, so if you do end up being in London anyway, please let me know!

[replying via email, so haven't Read The Whole Thread Before Replying]

[doseybat]

Yes please London + crashspace 14th-16th: happy to do social stuff whenever it fits in with you both.

[liv]

Squeeee that sounds like an excellent plan! We might be a bit zonked from travelling, but it would be wonderful to see you if you don't mind that.

[simont]

I am really struggling to translate the official British Colour Council code (BCC149) into a modern digital code

Good grief, yes! I've been googling frantically all over the place for twenty minutes (note to self, must stop taking 'this is really difficult' as a challenge) and have turned up astonishingly little – you'd think somebody would have transcribed standards like that into some kind of form that didn't depend on physical silk samples (even if, as seemed quite likely, it was either an expensive pay-for document, or defined in terms of emission spectra rather than day-to-day RGB, or both), but I couldn't find any evidence of even the existence of such a reference let alone its content.

The best I managed was to find that BCC149 / stewart blue is also the colour used by the arts faculty of the University of Melbourne (says Wikipedia) and an Australian academic dress seller has a website which displays a little square of #0000cc to mark that. But it's hardly official!

(You might also find it amusing that a colour which turned up a lot more readily during my googlefest was, err, ahem, #bcc149 :-)

[liv]

Thanks for poking at that. I came up with pretty much the same conclusion, there doesn't seem to be any digital conversion of the BCC colour standards. And yes, I also found lots of irrelevant yellowy-green hex code results...

[morwen]

Short story: colour theory says that there is no easy, or right, answer to this. The best option is to pick one that looks about right.

(The long story includes a description of the difference between subtractive and additive colour spaces and why it is relevant.)

[liv]

Yes, ok, good point about the distinction between subtractive and additive colours. I know there used to be a device which was essentially a small digital camera you could point at, like, your sofa and bring it to the paint shop and they'd mix up a paint in a matching colour. But at some point you have to move from pigment colours to light colours, so if you want to be precise it makes sense that the standards are kept in physical, not digital form.

[morwen]

The crux is, the mapping depends on the lighting. It's not a matter of or idiom do much as there being two different concepts that we conflate (because we use the same ?)

This being hard is why my dad was able to make a living for many years doing colour-matching for textiles. (And I get to do it all from the other side in my job...)

[lethargic_man]

14th-16th June: I'm returning from travels with jack late on Thursday evening 13th. Would anyone like to see us either in London or Cambridge on the Friday or, more likely, during the weekend?

Sorry, I'll be chez aviva_m.

[liv]

OK, have fun visiting her, then!

[ephemera]

It's been so long since I was hairbunniez that I don't think anyone who was making then is still going - I'd say Etsy, probably, and be picky about the quality of the hair they're using if you want loose pony falls. (you'll be relatively limited in shades to "the ones they make" but if you're willing to pay for the really high quality silky straight hair it's very blendable, and someone may be willing to blend you the perfect shade for a fee. Or you could by human hair weft and dye) For either wool-dreds or loose pony-falls, you can DIY quite easily:hand making dread-dreads is, frankly, a faff, and there's a significant difference between someone's early attempts and a practised makers' work, so if that's what you're imagining, I'd contract that out.

[liv]

Squee, thank you, this is really incredibly helpful! Etsy, that's a really excellent idea. I was thinking wool rather than real hair. And I'm really not at all crafty, so I would almost certainly rather pay someone to make them. I don't mind spending money, my first students qualifying as doctors is a big occasion, and the university is paying for gown hire anyway.

It seems appropriate to try to match the colours exactly, since academic dress does tend to go for defined shades. But I wasn't sure if dyeing a specified colour is actually something people do.

[ephemera]

If you're thinking wool, then I might approach things as a) focus on yarn-related people to work on the colours, and then b) find someone to turn said perfectly dyed and textured wool into falls for you.

We used to use a lot of Collinette .5, which is hand-dyed pure-wool and a lovely thick-and-thin texture, chunky enough to work as dreds, but colour matching between batches was basically a non-starter. However, it's a small hand-dyed manufacturer, and you might have some luck contacting them direct for colour matching / custom batch (or finding shops that carry it to see things in person and then buying All You Can Find of that specific batch.)

(You probably know this, but the key to making wool falls work is how they're worn, and getting good coverage and/or some continuity with your natural hair colour, so you may want to factor that in - I used to throw a skein of something like their sample image of "peaches and cream" along with the crazy colours, to help with the visual blending against my pale red hair, and generally made a couple of fringe combs as well as the main falls to avoid the dreaded Norway Hair*.)

* that is, a final hairstyle resembling something that just flew in from Norway and landed on your head.

[liv]

Ooh, that's lovely, I'm not even a yarn-lover and I was drooling over the Colinette site. And yes, good advice about matching the hair-fall carefully so it doesn't make Norway Hair (wonderful expression!)

[pseudomonas]

I stand by my suggestion that you take your academic get-up into a well-stocked and well-lit embroidery shop and ask a member of staff to find a good match by eye, and then send this to whoever you're going to get to do the hairfall manufacturing (obv find out what kind of material and quantity they need first)

[liv]

This may well be a good idea, as it avoids the pigment versus digital problem. The trouble is that I am hiring the gown for the day, so I don't actually have a sample I can take in to a physical shop. I wonder if I can go to Ede & Ravenscroft and ask for a small sample of ribbon there, since they keep the official files on academic dress.

[pseudomonas]

I think the alternative is to use Pantone, which is specified as to what it looks like in real world, in a way that RGB codes I don't think are.

[pseudomonas]

Ah, I remembered what I was going to suggest: phone Ede & Ravenscroft and ask them for a Pantone code.

[kerrypolka]

I've just bought a Nokia Lumia (ie Windowsphone) to dodge The Google Monster - it hasn't arrived yet but I'll let you know how it is?

[liv]

Yes, getting a Windows phone instead of Android might be a good idea, just to avoid Google. I am a bit reluctant to give up my apps, though; I doubt there's a Windows version of the shiny Hebrew calendar with all the detailed zmanim, for example. And the stuff I'm using to track my exercise, I bet the Windows default (if it even exists) is full of awful weight-loss stuff.

[kerrypolka]

Yeah, I've basically resigned myself to very few apps, but I've decided it's worth it for me for the benefit of un-Googling myself phonewise.

Also, I would usually love to hang out but that's the weekend between last day at Oldjob and first day at Newjob, and I'm squirrelling it away as downtime! I hope to see you the next time you're in London, though!

[ceb]

No specific hairfall recommendation as I don't own any, but here's the list of Whitby goth market traders which may be a starting point (search through for 'hair'): http://wgwtraders.co.uk/list.aspx

pseudomonas's thread-matching suggestion sounds useful too. e.g. John Lewis in Cambridge should be able to do this for you. You might even be lucky enough to find useful wool of the right colour, in which case I'm sure there are fall-makers who would be happy to make a set from wool you supplied.

[liv]

Ooh, Whitby goth market, brilliant idea. And better to go for a British shop rather than trying to deal internationally through Etsy. Maybe what I do is buy wool from ephemera's site and send it to someone like these people to see if they can make it into hair falls for me :-)

[ceb]

Unrelated to post, but this is the ethics blog I was talking about the other night: http://scientopia.org/blogs/ethicsandscience/