I left things a week, going so far as to stop doing handstands every night in order to give my side a rest. This proved incredibly difficult, and the next time I cracked and started doing handstands again the pain came back. The next morning I was in agony.

At the weekend in Drumnadrochit (which I’ll write about in another post) I tried to arm a berimbau and the pains in my side came back as hard as ever. At that point I realised that the real cause of my pain must have been trying to arm a particularly stiff viola (high-pitched berimbau), with what was clearly poor technique.

I need to practise stringing them using more body weight and less strength because that way, I hope, there will be fewer musical instrument-based injuries in future.

The weather in Drumnadrochit says “rain” so a tent will probably not be so fun. I suspect thick socks and shoes might actually be more prudent, though we don’t plan on going for long walks.

I also have to think about getting something for lunch! Right, better get back to that bread, it’ll need worked a bit more and there’s no time to lose.

To distract us from issues of training spaces we gathered on Saturday past to rebuild our stock of instruments. We lost three berimbaus in the fire at the Steiner school so the plan was to get some replacements for the Glasgow group. We finished about five or six verga, waxed and with fresh leather caps for the few that were being refurbished. We used the recently harvested wire for new arame on these. The last stage we’ve not done anything about yet — preparing gourds and eventually marrying up the cabaças to make completed berimbaus.

And today I’m just back from The SPACE, which is approximately equivalent to the Out of the Blue drill hall in Leith, though less community-based. It’s in the floors above the Argyle Arcade so it’s harder to get at — the ground floor has many jewellery shops which don’t appreciate people tramping past at all hours.

It seems an interesting space which could provide something useful. The other option on the cards after a lot of hunting is the Overnewton Recreation Centre, curiously enough right next door to the Steiner school. For long enough they have not answer our calls but eventually we got through to them. The future of the space is under question but it seems we could get use of it for the next six months.

Finally things are looking up!

So it becomes clear to the world at large that Excel spreadsheets are programming, and being programming they will almost definitely contain bugs.

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

— Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

I have a particular interest here because I believe that programming should be something more widely taught and understood. Part of this greater understanding and familiarity will of course hammer home a truth understood by programmers all over the world: it’s very easy to make a mistake which doesn’t show up until too late.

So I’m happy to state that I finished Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O’Malley, who is also the author of the Scott Pilgrim series. (Which for the record I haven’t read or seen the film, I just found this fact interesting.) I enjoyed it greatly. It’s about a girl discovering some friends on an accidental road trip and deals with the important issues of the day — whether cats can steal your soul, that kind of thing.

And it’s a graphic novel/comic and short, which goes more than some way to explain why I managed to finish it. It probably only has about 20 pages worth of text, but the medium doesn’t require many words. It’s unlikely I can claim that each picture adds another thousand to the word count.

So what is Comic Bake? What was it back in the day? It’s a tool for converting little text files into comics. The files are designed to be as easy to write as possible, and are inspired by the likes of play scripts and Markdown documents.

The actual format is actually in a bit of flux at the moment as I recently decided what I was using wasn’t ideal and so I’ve cleaned things up. In fact last night was spent cleaning up the parser considerably, not least because the code was several years old and my understanding of parser combinators and such has moved on since then. I’ve had more practice!

The scripts are combined with standard images provided by the user¹ and the resulting comic strip, with text in bubbles and all that, written back out to disk. I’m always shocked that it works, to be honest!

At some point obviously I want to (a) put it on Hackage and maybe (b) look into binary releases so people don’t have to install the entirety of the Haskell Platform and various development libraries (ImageMagick and GD, talk about indecisive!) just to use it. It’s not quite at the initial release stage yet though. I want to make it a bit more usable and maybe improve the algorithm for speech bubble placement before I do that.

But I’m glad I pulled it out of the archive; I’m feeling really good about it now and finally getting to do some interesting coding after a long period of stagnation.

While he is making the most of his final months with family and friends the rest of the literary world is mourning him. This will no doubt come as a slight shock to him, but it isn’t surprising to me. He wrote some exceedingly good books.

Meanwhile the rest of us will maybe try to grasp that wheel harder.

I’ve not been down to see the building, or at least what remains of it, but the fire was going basically all day so I suspect there isn’t much left but the stone exterior walls. And they’ll be too damaged for the building to be deemed sound I would guess.

As a group we have often spoken of trying to find new premises but it’s very easy not to put in effort or make decisions when you have something. This fire has forced our hand and we’ve already had serious discussions about a couple of venues nearby.

By next Thursday I hope I’ll be able to say “we have tried one new training area”, and maybe we’ll have tried out another not long after that. It would be great to end somewhere that gives us more visibility to fitness types (like a real gym) or that is in an easily accessible place.

Here’s to us, rising from the ashes!

Today I managed a couple of really lengthy handstands which were totally unsupported. One of them I actually had to stop because nothing was going to happen to stop it otherwise. Now honestly I don’t know what the actual measurement would have been but I’m guessing at least ten seconds of freestanding inversion without overshooting.

In the last fortnight I’d been slightly worried that I was reaching a plateau so I’ve been trying to force new difficulties into my five minutes. The first being, obviously, doing them well away from the wall so I risk overshooting. The second is making them harder by going in sideways — more of a cartwheel entrance rather than face-on. This is more capoeira-focused so I’ve also been trying to not look at the ground as I place my hands but to keep my eyes on my imaginary opponent.

Between all these things I’ve managed to push through the stage last week where I thought I was stagnating — to produce exciting new freestanding developments. Just from five minutes every day.

Thankfully this hasn’t happened to me, but it has happened very recently to someone that I know. And I’m conscious that I do have a fairly large bunch of keys with me at all times, which is a liability.

There’s not even a comfortable way to carry them in my pocket without jabbing myself in the leg. I’d love to leave most of them at home; maybe have some kind of thumb-print access for the flat or something. Or voice recognition, that would be good (until it doesn’t work).